Last week, NASA released an excerpt that looks like it came straight out of the movie “Alien.” And for good reason: we hear the song of a black hole.
On Wednesday May 4, NASA published a sound clip on YouTube in which we hear the song of a black hole. A great first! The specialized magazine CNET specifies that the celestial object is located 200 million light-years from Earth.
And the least we can say is that this “melody” is as disturbing as it is fascinating. As Konbini points out, this sonification is a real technical feat. The reason ? Sound waves cannot travel through space.
However, the black hole is located right in the center of the Perseus Cluster, a set of a hundred galaxies . This interstellar medium is enveloped in a hot gas «which allows sound to travel», recalls the French media.
From then on, the American space agency set itself the task in 2003 of translating this series of notes into sound perceptible to the human ear. A challenge successfully met!
«Astronomers have found that pressure waves emitted by the black hole cause ripples in the hot gas of the cluster that can be translated into a note — a note that humans cannot hear, 57 octaves below the middle do ,” Nasa explains on YouTube.
Before adding: “The signals were then resynthesized in the range of human hearing by scaling them 57 and 58 octaves above their real height ”.
One thing is certain: space has not finished revealing all its secrets, to the delight of astronomers.