A clip released by NASA on Sunday demonstrates that space isn’t always silent.
Black holes are located more than 200 million light-years away from Earth, and the recording, or melody, if you will, was created using their soundwaves. It was first posted earlier this year, but this week after NASA’s tweet, it is receiving new responses on social media.
Am I the only one who finds this soothing? another person asked in response to those who described it as “creepy” or “haunted.”
Others said the tape sounded “like every black hole in every science fiction film ever,” despite the fact that it may be a revelation for others.
The Perseus galaxy cluster, an 11 million light-year-wide collection of galaxies encircled by heated plasma, contains the black hole as its center.
However, NASA claims that a galaxy cluster like Perseus includes gases “that encircle the hundreds or even thousands of galaxies within it, providing a medium for the sound waves to traverse.” This contradicts popular belief that there is no sound in space because it is essentially a vacuum.
According to NASA, in order to make the sounds in this recording audible to the human ear, they were scaled up 57 and 58 octaves from their original pitch.
The data for this sonification, which was published earlier this year during NASA’s Black Hole Week, was obtained by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
On the website of the Chandra X-ray Observatory are other sonifications, such as those of the supernova Cassiopeia A and the “Whirpool Galaxy” of Messier 51.
