NASA releases scary black hole sonifications 'with a remix' from Perseus galaxy cluster

Ending the Black hole week in style, NASA has released a sonification, which is an audio developed by translating astronomical data. The agency revealed that this sonification is from a galaxy cluster named Perseus which has been associated with sound for the last two decades. Until now, there is a common belief that sound cannot travel through space, because sound needs a medium to travel but outer space is a vacuum. However, the astronomers were able to produce this sonification due to the galaxy cluster, which has an enormous amount of gas that has thousands of galaxies within. These vast number of galaxies themselves form a medium allowing sound waves to travel. Check out the audio below.

How was the sound created?

Explaining the process behind translating the astronomical data into sound waves, NASA said that the sound waves previously identified by astronomers were extracted for the first time ever. These waves were basically signals emerging from the black holes that were resynthesized into the range of human hearing. The agency said that the video above has sounds made from waves emitted in different directions and that the colours blue and purple show X-ray data captured by the Chandra X-ray telescope.

The second video above is from the black hole in the galaxy Messier 87, or M87, which recently became famous after the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) captured its first direct image in 2019. This audio, however, does not feature the EHT data but, does include data from other telescopes that observed the M87 galaxy on much wider scales at roughly the same time.

According to NASA, the three panels shown in the video are, X-rays from Chandra, optical light from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, and radio waves from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile which majorly contributed to the observations. "The brightest part of the image corresponds to the loudest portion of the sonification, which is where astronomers find the 6.5-billion solar mass black hole that EHT imaged", NASA said in a statement. The supermassive black hole in the M87 galaxy resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun.