NASA has unveiled a haunting audio clip, capturing sound waves emanating from a supermassive black hole located 250 million light years away, at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster. These acoustic waves were transposed up 57 and 58 octaves to make them audible to human ears, as the original frequencies are far below the range of human hearing.
The eerie humming sound from the black hole was first detected in 2003 when astronomers observed sound waves rippling through the gas surrounding the supermassive black hole in the Perseus cluster. The lowest note ever recorded in the universe, a B-flat, was found much below the human hearing range, with a frequency cycle of 10 million years at that pitch.
NASA’s recent sonification amplified these sound waves, allowing us to hear what they would sound like while traveling through intergalactic space. The process involved playing the extracted waves in an anti-clockwise direction from the black hole’s center, making them audible in all directions at significantly increased pitches—144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequencies.
Listen Here:
As with many cosmic sound waves, the result is both eerie and mysterious. The gas and plasma drifting between galaxies in clusters, known as the ‘intracluster medium,’ is denser and hotter than the intergalactic medium outside. These sound waves might influence the regulation of star formation, playing a significant role in the long-term evolution of galaxy clusters.
