Hear the strange sounds of the black hole singing

Another sonication project was undertaken by a group led by Irene Kara, an astrophysicist at MIT, as part of an effort to use light echoes from X-ray bursts to map the environment around black holes, much like using bats. Sound to catch mosquitoes.

It’s all the fruit of “Black Hole Week,” NASA’s annual social media extravaganza, May 2-6. This week also brings an introduction to important news on May 12, when researchers used the Event Horizon Telescope, produced in 2019. The first image of a black holeto announce its latest results.

Black holes, according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, are objects with a gravitational pull so strong that nothing, not even light, let alone sound, can escape. Ironically, they may also be the brightest things in the universe. Before any kind of matter disappears forever in a black hole, theorists believe, it will be accelerated to near-light speeds by the hole’s gravitational field, heating up and spinning to millions of degrees. This will release flashes of X-rays, generate interstellar shock waves, and compress high-energy jets and particles through space like toothpaste from a tube.

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