“The misconception that there is no sound in space comes because most of space is a vacuum, providing no way for sound waves to travel,” NASA wrote on Sunday. “A galaxy cluster has so much gas that we’ve captured the real sound. Here it is amplified and mixed with other data, so you hear a black hole!” Augmented with other data, listeners get a taste of what a black hole sounds like — and it’s nothing short of weird and scary. “In this Perseus sounding, sound waves previously detected by astronomers were extracted and made audible for the first time,” NASA’s tweet explains. “Sound waves radiated outwards from the center.” Sonification, according to the Chandra X-ray Observatory at NASA, is the “process that translates data into sound.” The observatory released the audio in May for Black Hole Week. It is a “translation of astronomical data into sound”. “Since 2003, the black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster has been associated with sound,” they said in a statement in May. “That’s because the astronomers discovered that the pressure waves emitted by the black hole caused ripples in the cluster’s hot gas that could translate into a note — a note that humans can’t hear about 57 octaves below middle C . “Now, a new sound treatment brings more notes to this black hole sound machine.” The 34-second audio clip is a little chilling and has sparked humorous responses online with over 14 million views and more than 100,000 retweets as of Tuesday. SHARE:
