A terrifying audio clip of a supermassive black hole more than 250 million light years away from Earth was posted on the NASA Exoplanets Twitter account. As of Monday afternoon, it had received over 10 million views, and social media users got mixed reactions to the post.
Terrified Listeners
While many social media users found the eerie sound terrifying, some were thrilled to hear it for the first time. Twitter user Libby Watson wrote that she loved it when NASA tweeted something similar to inviting people to listen to space sounds, which resembles the wailing of billions of souls trapped forever in hell.
Author, CNN analyst, and former government official Juliette Kayyem tweeted that she was happier living with her misconception. Knowledge is overrated.
Astronomer Phil Plait also tweeted and wrote that everyone is talking about how eerie it is, but to him, how it just cuts off is the creepiest part.
Here's the sound bite posted on the NASA Exoplanets Twitter account.
What Gives the Black Hole That Eerie Sound?
Since most of the space is a vacuum, sound waves cannot travel there, which is where the myth that there is no sound in space comes from. There is so much gas in a galaxy cluster that NASA has detected actual sound.
According to CNET, astronomers discovered pressure waves emitted from Perseus' void-like interior decades ago. These waves cause a kind of ripple in the surrounding hot gas in the region, and the sound produced results from those ripples.
Consider sound waves to be the vibration of the air, or more precisely, the vibration of the atoms and molecules in the air. On Earth, those vibrations can be picked up by our ears and converted into audible noise, but things work a little differently in space.
No medium exists for sound waves to travel through because space is a vacuum. Because of this, many people believe that space is completely silent. However, the absence of sound from cosmic objects does not explain the silence. Simply put, their waves have nothing to vibrate.
But because Perseus' black hole is so close to the gas in the cluster, it can pass through the space vacuum sound barrier. The hot gas ripples scientists are concentrating on can produce sound wave vibrations.
Rainbow Sound Wave
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Black Hole Sonification Process
In 2003, a group from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory converted astronomical information from the gaseous ripples into the regular sound waves on Earth. However, a significant barrier kept us from hearing the black hole's song for a very long time. After completing the translation, or sonification, process, researchers discovered that the note played by Perseus' Abyss is an astounding 57 octaves below middle C. But because we cannot hear it, NASA's remix comes in and amplifies it.
The extracted sound waves were in radial, or outward directions from the center. The signals were then scaled up by 57 and 58 octaves above their true pitch to resynthesize them into the range of human hearing. They are being heard at frequencies that are 144 quadrillions and 288 quadrillions times higher than their original frequencies, respectively. You can hear waves emitted in various directions due to the radar-like scan surrounding the image. Blue and purple in the visual representation of these data both represent Chandra-collected X-ray data.
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