Featured Image Credit: The Guardian / YouTube MARK GARLICK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY / Getty
Have you ever wondered whether a black hole makes any noise?
Well, there's a video that reveals all and it’s possibly one of the creepiest sounds you’ll ever hear.
The black hole located in the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster has been associated with sound since 2003.
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While there is a misconception that there is no sound in space, because it is essentially a vacuum, a galaxy cluster does have sound.
NASA’s website explains: “A galaxy cluster has copious amounts of gas that envelop the hundreds or even thousands of galaxies within it, providing a medium for the sound waves to travel.”
The sound was discovered by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory where it noticed sound waves emitting from the centre of the black hole.
The cluster’s sound can be translated into a single note, which cannot be heard by humans.
For us to hear the sound of a black hole, scientists resynthesized the audio into a range humans can hear scaling it upwards by 57 and 58 octaves above its true pitch.
In other words, what you’re hearing is 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than its original frequency.
To put that into perspective, a quadrillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000.
The audio sounds haunting and something you might hear in a sci-fi horror film, so listen at your own risk.
The visual accompanying the audio shows the different waves emitted by the black hole.
“The radar-like scan around the image allows you to hear waves emitted in different directions. In the visual image of these data, blue and purple both show X-ray data captured by Chandra,” NASA wrote.
For decades, scientists have been studying this galaxy cluster known as Messier 87 or M87.
The sound data originated from telescopes observing M87 including X-rays from Chandra, optical light from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, and radio waves from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile.
The audio may be too chilling for some, but it does show how far we’ve come in space research, and helps us to understand our universe better.
