Hear the Strange Sounds of the Black Hole Song

You can’t hear a black hole scream in space, but you can apparently hear it sing.

Astrophysicists working with NASA’s orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory in 2003 Detected a ripple pattern in the X-ray glow Image of a giant galaxy cluster in the constellation Perseus. They were pressure waves, sound waves, 30,000 light-years across and radiating outward from the thin, ultra-hot gas that covers galaxy clusters. These were caused by periodic explosions from a supermassive black hole at the center of the cluster 250 million light-years away and containing thousands of galaxies.

With an oscillation period of 10 million years, the sound waves were acoustically equivalent to 57 octaves B-flat below middle C; it was a hue that the black hole had apparently held for the last two billion years. Astronomers suspect that these waves act as a brake on star formation, keeping the gas in the cluster too hot to condense into new stars.

Chandra astronomers recently “sounded out” these waves by accelerating the signals to 57 or 58 octaves above their original pitch, increasing their frequency a quadrillion times to make them audible to the human ear. As a result, the rest of us can now hear intergalactic sirens sing.

Thanks to these new cosmic headphones, the Perseus black hole makes eerie groans and rumbles this reminded the listener of the rumbling tones that signaled an alien radio signal Jodie Foster heard through headphones. in the science fiction movie “Contact”.

As part of an ongoing project to “end” the universe, NASA has similarly created the sounds of bright knots in an energy jet Shot from a giant black hole at the center of the massive galaxy known as M87. These sounds reach us as a magnificent array of orchestral tones over 53.5 million light years.

Another sonification project has been undertaken by a group led by Erin Kara, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as part of an effort to use light echoes from X-ray bursts to map the environment around black holes, similar to those used by bats. sound to catch mosquitoes.

All of this is the result of “Black Hole Week”, the social media splurge organized by NASA every year, May 2-6. As with this week, researchers with the Event Horizon Telescope produced in 2019 offer a head start on the big news on May 12. first image of a black holeThey will announce their latest results.

According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, black holes are objects whose gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, much less sound can escape. Paradoxically, they could also be the brightest things in the universe. Theorists predict that before any matter becomes a black hole forever, the hole will be accelerated to near-light speeds by the gravitational field and heated to millions of degrees. This would fire X-ray flashes, generate interstellar shock waves, and compress high-energy jets and particles through space like too much toothpaste out of a tube.

In a common scenario, there is a black hole with a star in a binary system and it steals material from it, which develops into a dense, luminous disk—a visible doomsday donut—that produces occasional X-ray bursts.

A group led by Jingyi Wang, an MIT graduate student, looked for echoes, or reflections, of these X-ray bursts using data from a NASA instrument called the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer – NICER. The time lag between the original X-ray bursts and their echoes and distortions caused by black holes’ peculiar gravitational proximity gave insight into the evolution of these violent bursts.

Meanwhile, Dr. Kara is working with education and music experts to convert X-ray reflections into audible sound. In some simulations of this process, he said, the flashes travel all the way to the periphery of the black hole, producing a marked shift in wavelengths before they are reflected.

Dr. “I love that we can ‘hear’ general relativity in these simulations,” Black said in an email.

Eat your heart, Pink Floyd.