250 million light-years distant, a supermassive black hole has been captured on audio in a chilling NASA release.
For the acoustic waves emanating from the black hole at the heart of the Perseus cluster of galaxies to be audible to human ears, they had to be transposed up 57 to 58 octaves.
This is the first time that the sound waves have been isolated and amplified. The Perseus galaxy cluster’s supermassive black hole is known for its eerie wails, and in 2003, NASA scientists discovered something truly amazing: acoustic waves traveling across the vast quantities of gas surrounding it.
NASA’s Black Hole Audio Is Mind-Blowing
The waves contain the lowest note ever heard by humans and are much below the threshold of human hearing. We can now hear what the black hole’s notes would sound like if they were echoing over intergalactic space thanks to the recent sonification, which also increased the recording’s octave range.
The lowest note, which was discovered in 2003, is a B-flat that is a little over 57 octaves below middle C; its frequency at that pitch is 10 million years. A twentieth of a second is the frequency of the lowest note that humans can hear. The supermassive black hole at the center of the Perseus cluster’s sound waves was extracted radially, or outwards, and played counterclockwise from the center so that we can hear the sounds coming from it in all directions at pitches that are 144 quadrillions and 288 quadrillion times greater than their original frequency.
In a massive effort by the Event Horizon Telescope NASA team, M87*, the first black hole to ever be directly photographed, was also sonified by other instruments at the same time. These include the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array for radio wavelengths, Hubble for visible light, and Chandra for X-rays.
