NASA releases the sound of the Black Hole.
A lot of people are under the assumption that there is no sound in space. When the word space is mentioned, a vast collection of stars, planets, and planetary materials often comes to mind, but just a vast space.
However, NASA recently debunked that by uploading the sounds the black hole imitates. NASA recently went to Twitter and uploaded an audio clip of the recent sound sonification collected from the Black Hole.
As NASA Exoplanets stated, the widespread belief that there is no sound in space originates from the fact that the vast majority of space is a vacuum, which does not allow sound waves to move through it.
The agency has detected actual sound coming from within a galaxy cluster due to the large amount of gas there.
The misconception that there is no sound in space originates because most space is a ~vacuum, providing no way for sound waves to travel. A galaxy cluster has so much gas that we've picked up actual sound. Here it's amplified, and mixed with other data, to hear a black hole! pic.twitter.com/RobcZs7F9e
— NASA Exoplanets (@NASAExoplanets) August 21, 2022
NASA's Perseus Cluster Sonification
The black hole is located in the heart of a galaxy cluster known as the Perseus galaxy cluster. This cluster is a magnificent collection of galaxies that spans 11 million light years and is shrouded in hot gas.
The sound waves that astronomers had previously identified have been extracted and made audible for the very first time in this recently developed method of sonification of Perseus.
The sound waves were collected in radial directions, which means that they were outwards from the center.
The sounds were then resynthesized into the range of human hearing by boosting them upwards through 57 and 58 octaves above their real pitch. This brought the signals into the range of human hearing.
According to NASA, "they are being heard 144 quadrillion to 288 quadrillion times louder than their original frequency." In addition to that, NASA states that a quadrillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000.
Due to that process, the human ear can now hear waves coming from a variety of directions thanks to the radar-like scan that goes around the image.
In the photo uploaded by NASA, the color blue represents X-ray data that was collected by Chandra, while the color purple represents data that was captured by Chandra.
Read Also: #SpaceSnap: NASA Perseverance Rover Looks Back at Wheel Tracks
The Sound of the Black Hole
According to CNET, sound waves can be thought of as the vibration of air, or more specifically, the vibration of things like particles and molecules that are contained within the air.
On Earth, human ears are able to detect those vibrations and convert them into audible noise, but in space, things are a little bit different.
Sound waves are unable to travel through space because the universe is made up of nothing but empty space. Because of this, space is typically considered to be completely silent.
However, the absence of sound is not due to the fact that cosmic objects do not produce sound. Their waves simply cannot vibrate because there is nothing to cause them to.
On the other hand, due to its proximity to the cluster's gas, the black hole known as Perseus is able to circumvent the sound barrier imposed by the space vacuum. It is possible for it to generate sound wave vibrations, and it is those hot gas ripples that researchers are concentrating on.
Since it revisits the precise sound waves that were discovered in data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, this sound sonification is unlike any other that has ever been done before.
Related Article: NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is on a Mission to Find the First Supermassive Black Holes
