NASA's Engineers Shares Eerie Sound Recordings Of A Black Hole On The Occasion Of Black Hole Week 2022

 

NASA has recently released the eerie sound coming from a black hole  on Black Hole Week 2022

Black holes are some of the most fascinating and powerful objects in space, and still an enigma for space engineers. They are extremely dense, with a strong gravitational attraction that not even light can escape their grasp. 

Now, a remarkable achievement has been made possible by the NASA engineers, who recently captured the eerie sound coming from a black hole, the first ever sounds to be synthesized from a black hole. The sonification has prompted space fans and enthusiasts to call the echoes both "scary" and "cool."

These “echoes” that space phenomena emit in the form of X-Rays have been made audible by new technology and the environment surrounding the massive cosmic object.

A 34-second video recording was posted on YouTube, in honour of Black Hole Week 2022 by NASA. The footage explains that the source of the sinister recording is from deep within the Perseus Galaxy Cluster, roughly 250 million light-years from Earth.

“This sonification is unlike any other efforts done before since it revisits the actual sound waves discovered in data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory,” NASA said in a statement.

The transcription of astronomical data into noise of well-known black holes, including one at the centre of the Perseus galaxy cluster (discovered by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory in 2003) and another at the centre of Galaxy M87, which is approximately 60 million light years from Earth.

"The popular misconception that there is no sound in space originates with the fact that most of the space is essentially a vacuum, providing no medium for sound waves to propagate through. 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," - NASA wrote on YouTube.

The waves that came out of the black hole cannot be heard by humans, for they're 57 octaves below middle C - imperceptible to humans. So, they've converted that "echos" from data to sound waves in the human hearing range.

NASA added: “The sound waves were extracted in radial directions, that is, outwards from the centre. The signals were then resynthesized into the range of human hearing by scaling them upward by 57 and 58 octaves above their true pitch.”

“Another way to put this is that they are being heard 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency.” Black holes are regions of spacetime that are formed when massive stars collapse at the end of their lives and can continue to grow by absorbing and merging with other black holes.

The new sonification for M87, as per NASA, detects across the three-tiered visual from left to right, with every wavelength represented to a various ranges of audible tones. Radio signals are assigned to the minimum tones, optical data to the moderate tones, and Chandra-detected X-rays to the highest tones.

These sonifications, which were led by the Chandra X-ray Center (CXC), were a part of NASA's Universe of Learning (UoL) program with support from the Goddard Space Flight Center/ Hubble Space Telescope. The collaboration was led by visualization scientist Kimberly Arcand (CXC), musician Andrew Santaguida and astrophysicist Matt Russo, (both of the SYSTEMS Sound project). The Chandra program is handled by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.