Hear a Black Hole’s “Howl”!

Hear a Black Hole’s “Howl”!

“In space, no one will hear your scream. » all who have seen foreigner, know. Because no sound can propagate in the vacuum of space. into the void. But in a cluster of galaxies surrounded by gas, it’s something else. And NASA researchers are now offering us something incredible. Let’s hear… Black Hole’s song!

Perseus cluster is a cluster of galaxies Some 250 million . situated atlight year Of the earth It contains about 200 galaxies. And at its center is a black hole. In 2003, NASA researchers found that waves emanating from this black hole produced ripples in the hot gas of the cluster. He translated the waves into a musical note. A note, however, is not audiblehuman ear Since about 57 octaves below middle C.

Today’s astronomers Introduce what one might call new sonification black hole, However this time they wanted to revisit the actual sound waves detected in the data from the space observatory. X-ray Chandra. What ? Actual sound waves? but we don’t say that there is no sound in space ,

Sounds from other black holes

This is true when the considered space is empty. But in a cluster of galaxies there are hundreds of galaxies. A large amount of gas surrounds them. This allows sound waves to propagate. And these waves have been extracted by astronomers to make them audible here. frequency several million billion times.

Researchers are also working on sonification of another black hole. Perhaps the most famous of them all, as it is the M87 whose first imagereceived fromevent horizon telescope (EHT) was unveiled in 2019. However, it is not on this image that astronomers rely on to extract sound from it. but on others, referenced by Chandra to speak Hubble Space Telescope and by the larger millimeter/submillimeter network of the Atacama (Alma, Chile). data to wavelength To which the researchers matched a different range of audible tones. lowest for waves radioFrom ALMA, medium tones for optical data from Hubble and high tones for X-rays from Chandra.

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