NASA Posts the Eerie Sound of a Black Hole

The sound of a black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster, which is located approximately 240 million light-years from Earth, was posted by NASA as part of what it described as a remixed sonification.

According to NASA, the sound waves astronomers previously identified were “extracted and made audible” for the first time this year.

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

People were astounded that anything, much less what sounds like a creepy, guttural moan, could exit a black hole after hearing the 34-second clip, which went viral on social media.

The notion that there is no sound in space, however, is false, according to the agency. A galaxy cluster, on the other hand, “has copious amounts of gas that envelop the hundreds or even thousands of galaxies within it, providing a medium for the sound waves to travel,” the agency said.

Black Hole Remix Clip Gains More Than 13 Million Views on Twitter

The “Black Hole Remix” clip was initially uploaded in early May to coincide with NASA’s Black Hole Week, but it wasn’t until the NASA exoplanets team tweeted about it on Sunday that it gained significant attention, gaining more than thirteen million views.

In 2003, after fifty-three hours of observation, scientists working on NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory “discovered that pressure waves sent out by the black hole caused ripples in the cluster’s hot gas that could be translated into a note.”

Frequency Turned 288 Quadrillion Times Higher to be Heard

According to NASA, that note’s frequency was too low for humans to hear because it was equal to a B-flat, which is almost fifty-seven octaves below the center C note on a piano. Hence, Chandra astronomers altered the sound and raised its frequency by fifty-seven and fifty-eight octaves.

NASA added that “another way to put this is that they are being heard 144 quadrillions and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency.”

Kimberly Arcand, the project’s chief investigator, excitedly recalled the moment when she first heard the sound in late 2021, which she described as “a beautiful Hans Zimmer score with the moody level set at really high.”

Arcand, the visualization scientist and emerging technologies head at Chandra, remarked that “it was…a wonderful representation of what existed in [her] mind.” However, she added that it was also a “tipping point” for the sonification initiative as a whole since it “really sparked people’s imagination.”

This also suggests potential directions for further study, Arcand said. “The idea that there are these supermassive black holes sprinkled throughout the universe that are belching out incredible songs is a very tantalizing thing,” she added.

According to experts, the sound in NASA’s remix is not exactly what you would hear if you were near a black hole. Michael Smith, an astronomy professor at the University of Kent in England says human ears are not  “sensitive enough to be able to pick up those sound waves.”

According to Smith, they, are however, the right sort of frequency that would be picked up and heard if amplified much like turning up the volume on a radio.

Using Social Media to Explain Complicated Scientific Discoveries

The agency’s decision to make the nearly two-decade-old data’s “re-sonification” public is a part of its efforts to use social media to explain complicated scientific discoveries to its millions of followers in simple terms.

NASA said in a news release that through a collaboration with Twitter, it learned that “while its fans enjoyed stunning photos of space and behind-the-scenes looks into missions, there was a group of people who wanted to know what space sounded like, too.”

Although not everyone liked the altered sounds of the black hole, the project and NASA’s tweets about it seem to have succeeded in the space agency’s goal of engaging the general public in discourse about its science and research.

Online, individuals expressed mixed emotions about it, comparing it vividly to movies such as Silent Hill and Lord of the Rings. Others had fun with the audio clip, adding an image of an interplanetary dog or remixing it with a new sound that they believed was the closest to a mummy’s voice.