The black hole sings, and we can listen to it thanks to NASA

Reading time: 2 minutes – detected The New York Times

It’s an exceptional audio clip shared by NASA: the melody emitted by a black hole located about 250 million light-years from Earth. A voice in space? impossible. It’s actually a little more complicated than that.

The black hole that scientists looked at is located at the center of a constellation known as the Perseus Cluster, which consists of hundreds of galaxies covered in hot gas. Especially important details, The New York Times reports.

Normally, sound does not propagate in a vacuum, so it is impossible to “listen into space”. But in this cluster, the gases that surround all of these galaxies allow the waves from the black hole to propagate. These ripples in hot gas as early as 2003 were translated into musical notes by NASA researchers, but their sounds proved inaudible to the human ear. until today.

song now audible

Thanks to Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have increased the frequency of these waves by millions of times. As a result, the black hole song was now audible.

Since good news never comes alone, NASA has also released VOICE from space once again. This time, it’s a black hole located in the heart The massive galaxy M87About 53.5 million light years. The sound clip is the result of the overlay of content captured by X-rays from Chandra, optical light from Hubble and radio waves from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile, CNET says. Much more enchanting soundtrack than Perseus’ black hole sound!