Over the weekend, NASA shared audio of sound waves that astronomers extracted from the black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster. The sounds were then amplified and mixed with other data to create this track: NASA clarified that it was “not intentionally made ominous, but the sound you hear is greatly amplified and other sounds are interpreted from light data.” “One of the motivations for creating such sound data is the desire to share science with more people,” the space agency added. The black hole at the center of Perseus has been associated with the sound since 2003, when astronomers discovered that pressure waves emitted by the black hole caused ripples in the cluster’s hot gas that could translate into a note, NASA explained in May when the audio was first released. The note is too low for humans to hear, at about 57 octaves below middle C. NASA re-synthesized the sound waves into the range of human hearing by scaling them tens of octaves above their actual loudness. He also added more notes by translating astronomical data into sound.
