Listen to the strange sounds of the black hole singing

You can’t hear the black hole screaming in space, but it sounds like you can hear it sing.

In 2003 astrophysicists worked with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory Detection of a pattern of ripples in X-ray glare Giant galaxy cluster in the constellation Perseus. They were pressure waves – that is, sound waves – spanning 30,000 light-years and radiating outward through the thin, superheated gas that fills galaxy clusters. They were caused by periodic explosions from a supermassive black hole at the center of the cluster, which is 250 million light-years away and contains thousands of galaxies.

With an oscillation period of 10 million years, the sound waves were acoustically equivalent to a B-flat 57 octaves below middle C, a tone the black hole has apparently maintained for the past two billion years. Astronomers believe these waves act as a brake on star formation, making the gas in the cluster too hot to condense into new stars.

Chandra astronomers recently “sonicated” these ripples by accelerating the signals to 57 or 58 octaves above their original tones, increasing their frequency four times to make them audible to the human ear. As a result, the rest of us can now hear intergalactic sirens.

Through these new cosmic speakers, the Perseus black hole Makes it strange to purr This reminded the listener of galumphing tones that refer to a strange radio signal that Jodie Foster hears through headphones In the science fiction movie “Contact.”

As part of an ongoing project to “sonicate” the universe, NASA has also released a similar generation Luminous knots sound in a jet of energy Firing from a giant black hole at the center of the giant galaxy known as M87. These sounds reach us across 53.5 million light-years as a majestic sequence of orchestral notes.

Another sonication project was undertaken by a group led by Irene Kara, an astrophysicist at MIT, as part of an effort to use light echoes from X-ray bursts to map the environment around black holes, much like using bats. Sound to catch mosquitoes.

It’s all the fruit of “Black Hole Week,” NASA’s annual social media extravaganza, May 2-6. This week also provides an introduction to important news on May 12, when researchers used the Event Horizon Telescope, produced in 2019. The first image of a black holeto announce their latest results.

Black holes, according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, are objects with a gravitational pull so strong that nothing, even light, let alone sound, can escape. Ironically, they can also be the brightest things in the universe. Before any kind of matter disappears forever in a black hole, theorists believe, it will be accelerated to near-light speeds by the hole’s gravitational field, heating up and spinning to millions of degrees. This will release X-ray flashes, generate interstellar shock waves, and compress high-energy jets and particles through space much like toothpaste from a tube.

In one common scenario, a black hole exists in a binary system with a star and steals material from it, which accumulates in a dense, bright disk–a visible donut of death–intermittently producing X-ray bursts.

Using data from a NASA instrument called the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer – NICER – a group led by Jinji Wang, a graduate student at MIT, searched for echoes, or reflections, of these X-ray bursts. The time delay between the original X-ray bursts and their reverberation and distortions caused by the strange gravitational proximity of black holes have provided insight into the evolution of these violent outbursts.

Meanwhile, Dr. Kara has been working with education and music experts to convert X-ray reflections into audible sound. In some simulations of this process, she said, the flashes orbit the black hole, causing a distinct shift in their wavelengths before being reflected.

“I just love that we can ‘hear’ general relativity in this simulation,” Dr. Kara said in an email.

Eat your hearts out, Pink Floyd.