You can now listen to the sound of a supermassive black hole
Ever wanted to know what a supermassive black hole sounds like? I imagine you hadn’t given it much thought until just now, but the time has come to find out nonetheless. That’s right, our good friends at NASA have shared an utterly terrifying audio clip of sound waves emanating from a supermassive back hole. But don’t worry, it’s over 250 million light-years away, so there’s no chance of getting sucked into it just yet. Or is there? Just kidding, there’s definitely not.
So which black hole are we talking about here? Is it the one Matt Bellamy sings about in that Muse song? Thankfully not. This particular black hole is located at the centre of the Persues cluster of galaxies.
The quest to give sonic life to something that, famously, not even time can escape began in 2003 when astronomers discovered that the pressure waves being sent out by the black hole caused the gas in the galaxy cluster to ripple. These ripples, it was discovered, could be translated into a note, though it is some 57 octaves below middle C and thus impossible for humans to hear. This audio is the result of those waves being transposed up 57 and 58 octaves so that they’re audible to humans.
This new recording goes against the popular misconception that there is no sound in space, an idea that originates from the fact that much of space is a vacuum, meaning no sound waves for sound to travel through. However, a galaxy cluster like Persues has enough gas to envelop thousands of galaxies, thus providing a channel by which sound waves can travel.
Just to give you an impression of just how low the note discovered in 2003 is (it’s a B-flat by the way), the lowest note detectable to humans has a frequency of one-twentieth of a second. The note NASA found at the centre of the Perseus cluster has a frequency of ten million years.
The sound waves were extracted radially and played in an anti-clockwise direction from the centre of the galaxy cluster. What we’re hearing in this clip is the sounds from all directions of the supermassive black hole recorded at pitches 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency. And it sounds almost exactly like the noise my belly makes when I’m hungry. Isn’t space amazing?
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