How Black Hole Observations Were Turned Into Sound

Space.com

Chandra X-ray Observatory observations of the Perseus galaxy cluster's black hole and M87's jet have been turned into sound by SYSTEM Sounds. The Chandra team explains how it was done.

Transcript

00:00Visit Chandra's Beautiful Universe

00:05Black Hole Sonification Remix

00:10Since 2003, the black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster

00:15has been associated with sound. This is because astronomers

00:20discovered that pressure waves sent out by the black hole caused ripples in the cluster's

00:25hot gas that could be translated into a note, one that humans cannot hear,

00:30some 57 octaves below middle C. Now, a new sonification

00:35brings more notes to this black hole sound machine.

00:40This new sonification, that is, the translation of astronomical data into sound,

00:45is being released for NASA's Black Hole Week this year.

00:50In some ways, this sonification is unlike any other done before

00:55because it revisits the actual sound waves discovered in data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

01:00The popular misconception that there is no sound in space

01:05originates with the fact that most of space is essentially a vacuum,

01:10providing no medium for sound waves to propagate through. A galaxy cluster, on the other hand,

01:15has copious amounts of gas that envelop the hundreds or even thousands of galaxies within it,

01:20providing a medium for the sound waves to travel.

01:25In this new sonification of Perseus, the sound waves astronomers previously identified

01:30were extracted and made audible for the first time.

01:35The sound waves were extracted in radial directions, that is, outwards from the center.

01:40The signals were then re-synthesized into the range of human hearing

01:45by scaling them upward by 57 and 58 octaves above their true pitch.

01:50Another way to put this is that they are being heard 144 quadrillion

01:55and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency.

02:00A quadrillion is a 1 followed by 15 zeros.

02:05A radar-like scan around the image allows you to hear waves emitted in different directions.

02:10In the visual image of these data, blue and purple both show X-ray data captured by Chandra.

02:15In addition to the Perseus galaxy cluster,

02:20a new sonification of another famous black hole is being released.

02:25Studied by scientists for decades, the black hole in Messier 87,

02:30or M87, gained celebrity status in science

02:35after the first release from the Event Horizon Telescope, or EHT, in 2019.

02:40This new sonification does not feature the EHT data,

02:45but rather looks at data from other telescopes that observed M87

02:50on much wider scales at roughly the same time.

02:55The image in visual form contains three panels that are from top to bottom,

03:00X-rays from Chandra, optical light from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope,

03:05and radio waves from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile.

03:10The brightest region on the left of the image is where the black hole is found,

03:15and the structure to the upper right is a jet produced by the black hole.

03:20The jet is produced by material falling onto the black hole.

03:25The sonification scans across the three-tiered image from left to right,

03:30with each wavelength mapped to a different range of audible tones.

03:35Radio waves are mapped to the lowest tones, optical data to medium tones,

03:40and X-rays detected by Chandra to the highest tones.

03:45This image shows the loudest portion of the sonification,

03:50which is where astronomers find the 6.5 billion solar mass black hole that EHT imaged.

03:55These two new black hole sonifications join the growing collection of these special products

04:00created by the team at the Chandra X-ray Center and their colleagues.

04:05For more on this ongoing project, please visit our website called A Universe of Sound.

04:10NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology

04:40NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology

Category

Transcript

Recommended