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How Black Hole Observations Were Turned Into Sound
Space.com
Follow
30/06/2025
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.
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🤖
Tech
Transcript
Display full video transcript
00:00
Visit Chandra's Beautiful Universe
00:05
Black Hole Sonification Remix
00:08
Since 2003, the black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster
00:14
has been associated with sound.
00:18
This is because astronomers discovered that pressure waves sent out by the black hole
00:23
caused ripples in the cluster's hot gas that could be translated into a note,
00:27
one that humans cannot hear, some 57 octaves below middle sea.
00:33
Now, a new sonification brings more notes to this black hole sound machine.
00:39
This new sonification, that is, the translation of astronomical data into sound,
00:45
is being released for NASA's Black Hole Week this year.
00:49
In some ways, this sonification is unlike any other done before
00:54
because it revisits the actual sound waves discovered in data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.
01:01
The popular misconception that there is no sound in space
01:04
originates with the fact that most of space is essentially a vacuum,
01:09
providing no medium for sound waves to propagate through.
01:12
A galaxy cluster, on the other hand, has copious amounts of gas
01:16
that enveloped the hundreds or even thousands of galaxies within it,
01:21
providing a medium for the sound waves to travel.
01:24
In this new sonification of Perseus,
01:27
the sound waves astronomers previously identified
01:30
were extracted and made audible for the first time.
01:34
The sound waves were extracted in radial directions,
01:37
that is, outwards from the center.
01:39
The signals were then re-synthesized into the range of human hearing
01:44
by scaling them upward by 57 and 58 octaves above their true pitch.
01:50
Another way to put this is that they are being heard
01:52
144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency.
02:00
A quadrillion is a 1 followed by 15 zeros.
02:03
The radar-like scan around the image
02:06
allows you to hear waves emitted in different directions.
02:11
In the visual image of these data,
02:13
blue and purple both show X-ray data captured by Chandra.
02:17
In addition to the Perseus galaxy cluster,
02:21
a new sonification of another famous black hole is being released.
02:26
Studied by scientists for decades,
02:28
the black hole in Messier 87, or M87,
02:31
gained celebrity status in science
02:34
after the first release from the Event Horizon Telescope,
02:38
or EHT, in 2019.
02:41
This new sonification does not feature the EHT data,
02:45
but rather looks at data from other telescopes
02:48
that observed M87 on much wider scales
02:51
at roughly the same time.
02:53
The image in visual form contains three panels
02:57
that are from top to bottom,
02:59
X-rays from Chandra,
03:01
optical light from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope,
03:04
and radio waves from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile.
03:09
The brightest region on the left of the image
03:11
is where the black hole is found,
03:14
and the structure to the upper right
03:16
is a jet produced by the black hole.
03:19
The jet is produced by material falling onto the black hole.
03:23
The sonification scans across the three-tiered image
03:27
from left to right,
03:28
with each wavelength mapped to a different range of audible tones.
03:33
Radio waves are mapped to the lowest tones,
03:36
optical data to medium tones,
03:38
and X-rays detected by Chandra to the highest tones.
03:42
The brightest part of the image
03:43
corresponds to the loudest portion of the sonification,
03:46
which is where astronomers find
03:49
the 6.5 billion solar mass black hole
03:52
that EHT imaged.
03:54
These two new black hole sonifications
03:57
join the growing collection of these special products
04:00
created by the team at the Chandra X-ray Center
04:02
and their colleagues.
04:04
For more on this ongoing project,
04:06
please visit our website called A Universe of Sound.
04:09
A Universe of Sound
04:39
A Universe of Sound
Recommended
5:05
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