You can't hear a black hole scream in space, but you can hear it sing.
In 2003 astrophysicists working with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory detected ripples in the X-ray glow of a giant cluster of galaxies. The sound waves were 30,000 light-years across and traveled through the thin, ultrahot gas that suffuses galaxy clusters. The explosions were caused by a black hole at the center of the cluster, which is 250 million light-years away.
The sound waves were equivalent to a B-flat 57 octaves below middle C, a tone that the black hole has apparently been holding for the last two billion years. Astronomers think that the waves keep the gas in the cluster too hot to form new stars.
The Chandra astronomer boosted the frequencies of the signals to make them audible to the human ear. The rest of us can now hear the sirens.
The sound of the black hole making eerie moans and rumbles reminded this person of the sound Jodie Foster hears in the film Contact.
NASA released sounds of bright knots in a jet of energy shooting from a giant black hole at the center of a humongous galaxy as part of an ongoing project to "sonify" the universe. The sounds reach us across 53.5 million light-years.
An effort to map the environment around black holes using light echoes from X-ray bursts has been undertaken by a group led by an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
All this is a result of Black Hole Week, an annual NASA social media event. On May 12th, researchers with the event horizon telescope will announce their latest results, which produced the first image of a black hole.
Einstein's general theory of relativity states that black holes are objects with gravity so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. They can be the best things in the universe. It would be accelerated to near-light speeds by the hole's gravity and heated, swirling to millions of degrees, before any sort of matter disappears forever into a black hole, according to theorists. This would cause X-ray flashes, generate shock waves, and squeeze high-energy jets and particles across space like toothpaste.
A black hole in a system with a star can steal material from it and create a dense, bright disk that emits X-rays.
A group led by an M.I.T. graduate student sought echoes or reflections from the X-ray blasts. The time delay between the original X-ray blasts and their echoes and distortions caused by their nearness to black holes offered insight into the evolution of violent bursts.
Dr. Kara is working with education and music experts to convert the X-ray reflections into audible sound. She said that in some simulations of this process, the flashes go all the way around the black hole, generating a telltale shift in their wavelength before being reflected.
Dr. Kara said in an email that she loved that we could hear the general relativity in the simulations.
Pink Floyd, eat your heart out.
A guide to the spaceship.
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