The clip features the sounds of a massive black hole located more than 200 million light years away.
The Perseus cluster of galaxies isa group of galaxies 11 million light-years wide, shrouded in hot gas. They are the key to the sound waves that can be heard in the clip released by NASA. Decades ago, scientists discovered that Perseus was emitting pressure waves. They pulsate in the hot gas that surrounds a cluster of galaxies, and these waves can be converted into sound.
The misconception that there is no sound in spaceoriginates because most space is a ~vacuum, providing no way for sound waves to travel. A galaxy cluster has so much gas that we've picked up actual sound. Here it's amplified, and mixed with other data, to hear a black hole! pic.twitter.com/RobcZs7F9e
— NASA Exoplanets (@NASAExoplanets) August 21, 2022
On Earth, sounds are produced when sound wavescause the atoms and molecules in the air to vibrate. In space, things are a little different. Space is a vacuum, which means that vibrations do not have air in which they can vibrate and make noise. But this does not mean that there are no vibrations. This is the principle that NASA scientists applied to create the sound clip.
In the case of the Perseus black hole, the space giantis so close to the cluster's gas clouds that it creates sound wave oscillations in the form of gas ripples. In 2003, a team of astronomers from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory collected astronomical data about these ripples and converted them into sounds. The problem is that they were below the level that the human ear can pick up.
To fix this, NASA increased the audio data by 57 and 58 octaves so people could hear the massive black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster.
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