NASA made that abundantly clear on Sunday, sharing what the agency described as the sound of a black hole, available to human ears in audible form. And if you’re wondering how sound travels in the vacuum of space, NASA has an explanation. “The misconception that there is no sound in space comes because most of space is a vacuum, which provides no way for sound waves to travel. A galaxy cluster has so much gas that we have captured the actual sound. This is where it is amplified and mixed with other data, to listen to a black hole,” NASA’s exoplanet account tweeted. Tweet may have been deleted (opens in new tab) The galaxy cluster you’re “hearing” is Perseus, the data comes from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the recording was released in May for NASA’s Black Hole Week. As NASA explained it at the time, “astronomers discovered that pressure waves emitted by the black hole caused ripples in the cluster’s hot gas that could be translated into a note—a note that humans can’t hear about 57 octaves down from the middle C’. To us, it just sounds like the beginning of a really awful dubstep track. However, black holes can be “sounded” in much more pleasant ways. NASA also has a sonification of the black hole located about 54 million light-years away at the center of Galaxy Messier 87, or M87 (you can listen below). Yes, that’s the one captured in humanity’s first image of a black hole by the Event Horizon Telescope. The piece uses data collected by several telescopes — the Chandra X-ray Observatory, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile — and maps wavelengths across a different range of acoustic tones. The result, while far from the actual sound a black hole makes, is something you might enjoy at your next yoga session. NASA has created similar soundings of a distant galaxy and the sound whenever an exoplanet has been discovered. The agency has even recorded the eerie, alien sounds of Mars.
