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

00:08Since 2003, the black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster

00:14has been associated with sound.

00:18This is because astronomers discovered that pressure waves sent out by the black hole

00:23caused ripples in the cluster's hot gas that could be translated into a note,

00:27one that humans cannot hear, some 57 octaves below middle sea.

00:33Now, a new sonification brings more notes to this black hole sound machine.

00:39This new sonification, that is, the translation of astronomical data into sound,

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

00:49In some ways, this sonification is unlike any other done before

00:54because it revisits the actual sound waves discovered in data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

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

01:04originates with the fact that most of space is essentially a vacuum,

01:09providing no medium for sound waves to propagate through.

01:12A galaxy cluster, on the other hand, has copious amounts of gas

01:16that enveloped the hundreds or even thousands of galaxies within it,

01:21providing a medium for the sound waves to travel.

01:24In this new sonification of Perseus,

01:27the sound waves astronomers previously identified

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

01:34The sound waves were extracted in radial directions,

01:37that is, outwards from the center.

01:39The signals were then re-synthesized into the range of human hearing

01:44by scaling them upward by 57 and 58 octaves above their true pitch.

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

01:52144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency.

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

02:03The radar-like scan around the image

02:06allows you to hear waves emitted in different directions.

02:11In the visual image of these data,

02:13blue and purple both show X-ray data captured by Chandra.

02:17In addition to the Perseus galaxy cluster,

02:21a new sonification of another famous black hole is being released.

02:26Studied by scientists for decades,

02:28the black hole in Messier 87, or M87,

02:31gained celebrity status in science

02:34after the first release from the Event Horizon Telescope,

02:38or EHT, in 2019.

02:41This new sonification does not feature the EHT data,

02:45but rather looks at data from other telescopes

02:48that observed M87 on much wider scales

02:51at roughly the same time.

02:53The image in visual form contains three panels

02:57that are from top to bottom,

02:59X-rays from Chandra,

03:01optical light from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope,

03:04and radio waves from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile.

03:09The brightest region on the left of the image

03:11is where the black hole is found,

03:14and the structure to the upper right

03:16is a jet produced by the black hole.

03:19The jet is produced by material falling onto the black hole.

03:23The sonification scans across the three-tiered image

03:27from left to right,

03:28with each wavelength mapped to a different range of audible tones.

03:33Radio waves are mapped to the lowest tones,

03:36optical data to medium tones,

03:38and X-rays detected by Chandra to the highest tones.

03:41The brightest part of the image

03:43corresponds to the loudest portion of the sonification,

03:47which is where astronomers find

03:49the 6.5 billion solar mass black hole

03:52that EHT imaged.

03:54These two new black hole sonifications

03:57join the growing collection of these special products

04:00created by the team at the Chandra X-ray Center

04:02and their colleagues.

04:04For more on this ongoing project,

04:05please visit our website called A Universe of Sound.

04:09A Universe of Sound

04:39A Universe of Sound

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