You can’t hear the black hole screaming in space, but apparently you can hear it singing.
In 2003, astrophysicists working at NASA’s orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory detected a pattern of ripples in the X-ray glow of a giant cluster of galaxies in the Perseus constellation. They are pressure waves, or sound waves, that radiate outward for 30,000 light-years across the thin, ultra-hot gas that fills the cluster of galaxies. They are 250 million light-years away and were caused by regular explosions from a supermassive black hole in the center of a cluster containing thousands of galaxies.
With a vibration cycle of 10 million years, the sound waves were acoustically equivalent to a B flat 57 octaves below the middle C. This is the sound that black holes seem to have held for the past two billion years. Astronomers believe that these waves act as a brake on star formation, keeping the gas in the cluster hot and unable to condense into new stars. Chandra astronomers have recently “audible” these ripples by speeding up the signal 57 or 58 octaves above the original pitch and multiplying the frequency quadrillion several times to make it audible to the human ear. Did. As a result, the rest of us can hear the intergalactic sirens singing.
Through these new cosmic headphones, Perseus’s black hole makes eerie moans and grunts, giving this listener an intense tone that marks the alien radio signal that Jodie Foster hears through headphones in a sci-fi movie contact. It reminded me.
This is all the result of NASA’s annual social media festival, Black Hole Week, which takes place May 2-6.
© 2022 New York Times News Service
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