The bounty of black holes surrounds the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way.
NASA/CXXC/Columbia University/C. Healy et al.
For the first time in history, Earthlings could hear the sound of a black hole: a low-pitched groan, as if a heavy, creaking door had been opened over and over again.
NASA releases 35 second audio clip The sound was released earlier this month using electromagnetic data taken from the Perseus Galaxy Cluster, some 240 million light-years away.
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Data has been around since it was collected almost 20 years ago by Chandra . X-Ray Observatory. The decision to turn it into sound came recently, as part of NASA’s efforts over the past two years to translate stunning space photography into something that the ear can appreciate.
“I started the first 10 years of my career really paying attention only to visual appearance, and I just realized that I’ve been doing things that are detrimental to people who are not visually literate or people who are blind or visually impaired,” NASA optometrist Kimberly Arcand gives know NPR in an interview with Weekend edition.
While Perseus’ sound tries to mimic what a black hole actually looks like, Arcand’s other “sonication” is a rather creative image transfer. In that fantastic interpretation, each kind of matter—gas clouds or stars—gets a different sound; Items near the top of the image appear higher-pitched; The lightest spots are the harder ones.
For more NASA sonication examples, visit the agency world of sound web page. Or, read on to learn more from Arcand about the project.
Interview highlights
About how to make black hole sound
What we’re listening to is basically resonance, so sonicate the data for the actual sound waves in this galaxy cluster where there’s a supermassive black hole at the core that sort of burps and sends all these waves out, if you will. And scientists who initially study the data can figure out what those observations are. And it’s basically a flat B sound about 57 octaves below middle C. So we took the sound that the universe was singing about and put it back within the range of human hearing – because we certainly can’t hear 57 octaves below middle C.
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About the image sonication of the center of the Milky Way
So, we actually take the data and extrapolate the information we need. We are very interested in scientific stories to ensure that conversion from light to sound makes sense for people, especially for people who are blind or have low vision. So our Milky Way — that inner region — it’s really a biome where there’s a lot of frenetic activity going on. But if we look at other galaxies that may be a little quieter, or more turbulent at their core, it might look very different.
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On a sonication image of the Pillars of Creation from the Eagle Nebula in the constellation of the Snakes:
It’s like a star nursery. It’s a tall column of gas and dust where stars form and you’re listening to the interaction between the x-ray information and the optical information and it’s really trying to give you a piece of text.
These resulting audio clips can bring a bit of emotion to data that might sound vague and abstract.
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