These Eerie Wails Are a Real Sound Wave From a Supermassive Black Hole

We might not be able to hear sound in space, but there is still sound. The acoustic waves propagating through the gas surrounding the black hole were detected in 2003

We would not be able to hear them at their current pitch. The waves from the black hole at the center of the Perseus cluster are the lowest note in the Universe ever detected by humans.

The notes detected from the black hole have been added to by a new sonification so that we can get a sense of what they would sound like.

It is the first time these sound waves have been made audible.

The lowest note is a B-flat, which is just over 57 octaves below middle C, and has a Frequency of 10 million years. The lowest note can be detected by humans with a single-twentieth of a second.

The sound waves were played in an anticlockwise direction from the center, so that we could hear the sounds in all directions from the supermassive black hole.

The result is an eerie one, a sort of unearthly howling, like many of the waves recorded from space and transposed into audio frequencies.

The sounds are not just curiosities. The tenuous gas and plasma that moves between the galaxies in the cluster is denser and hotter than the intergalactic medium outside the cluster.

Sound waves propagating through the medium can be heated, as they move energy through the medium.

Sound waves play a vital role in the evolution of galaxy clusters because they regulate star formation.

The heat allows us to detect sound waves. The medium glows in X-rays because it is so hot. The sonification project was allowed by the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

The sonification treatment was given to another famous black hole. M87, the first black hole ever to be directly imaged, was also imaged by other instruments at the same time. Chandra for X-rays, Hubble for visible light, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array for radio wavelengths are included.

The images showed a huge jet of material being launched from the space immediately outside the black hole, at speeds that look like light in a vacuum. They have also been sonified.

The data was not sound waves, but light in different frequencies. The lowest frequencies have the lowest pitch in the sonification. X-rays are at the top of the range.

The method of turning visual data into sound can be a cool new way to experience phenomena.

Sometimes a dataset can reveal hidden details, allowing for more detailed discoveries about the mysterious and vast Universe around us.