The scale of space is not a human one: there are so many stars, so many galaxies, and they are so huge, and so far away, and anyway we’re not really seeing them, we are seeing the light from how they were, many millions or even billions of years in the past (if a black hole really did make this noise, it made it at around the time the first dinosaurs were around). No matter how much NASA explores space, we will never quite be able to grasp it. ‘Space’ is this sort of utterly transcendent thing, this thing which is supposed to make us feel how intensely small we are, this great beyond we can never truly understand. If ‘space’ had a soul, then the black hole sound is the music it would make.īut then I thought: you know, it’s odd. But more than anything else: the black hole sound sounds exactly like space. ![]() Personally, I think it sounds a bit like a Tim Hecker album I would quite like NASA to release a much longer version of the black hole sound, so I could work to it (Lo-fi black hole beats to study and relax to, perhaps). Or like a huge worm screaming, Jordan Peele’s new film Nope, and the music of Björk. While it’s usually thought that there is no sound in space, because space is a vacuum, this is not entirely true: a ‘galaxy cluster’, apparently (a group of galaxies bound closely together by gravity), ‘has so much gas that we’ve picked up actual sound’ – from a black hole at the centre of the Perseus galaxy cluster, 240 million light years away.Īnd really, what is notable about this sound is… that it sounds exactly like you would expect a black hole to. ![]() Last week, NASA went viral with what purported to be the sound of a black hole. Maybe we’ll write up all the gory details in a paper someday :).Are NASA not just cynically manipulating some otherwise wholly unimpressive sound wave data, mining it for clicks and likes? After shifting the frequencies into the human hearing range, these signals were then re-synthesized using two types of additive audio synthesis. We then filtered the image to help isolate the known frequency of the waves and applied a radial Fourier transform to extract periodic signals. We used the radial profile of the gas sound speed to partially correct for this. The wave sound speed changes with distance from the center which distorts the wavelengths. First, we needed to account for the fact that we are looking at the wavelengths of the sound waves but want to extract wave frequencies. not pressure waves) but the actual sound waves are present and audible.Įxtracting these waves was tricky! Here’s the technical info. This technique also sonifies periodic non-sound features, such as density variations and irregularities in the gas (i.e. They are strongest and clearest around 2 and 11 o’clock. In this radar-like scan (clockwise, starting at 12 o’clock) you can hear the waves that were emitted in different directions. The waves are triggered by a central black hole and propagate outwards. ![]() To make them more clearly audible, we have increased their true pitch by 57 and 58 octaves (144/288 quadrillion times their true frequency). ![]() We have extracted the waves from the image and re-synthesized them, bringing them into human hearing range. The period of these waves is about 10 million years while the period of middle C is about 4 milliseconds. Their pitch is a Bb, about 57 octaves below middle C making them the lowest frequency sound waves ever discovered. In 2003, sound waves were detected in x-ray images of the hot gas surrounding the Perseus cluster.
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