Thanks LibWhacker. Sonification is the name of the game, and each generation plays it the same.
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Posted on 05/04/2022 10:59:02 PM PDT by LibWhacker
Since 2003, the black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster has been associated with sound. This is because astronomers discovered that pressure waves sent out by the black hole caused ripples in the cluster's hot gas that could be translated into a note—one that humans cannot hear, some 57 octaves below middle C. Now a new sonification brings more notes to this black hole sound machine. This new sonification—that is, the translation of astronomical data into sound—is being released for NASA's Black Hole Week this year.
In some ways, this sonification is unlike any other done before because it revisits the actual sound waves discovered in data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The popular misconception that there is no sound in space originates with the fact that most of space is essentially a vacuum, providing no medium for sound waves to propagate through. A galaxy cluster, on the other hand, has copious amounts of gas that envelop the hundreds or even thousands of galaxies within it, providing a medium for the sound waves to travel.
In this new sonification of Perseus, the sound waves astronomers previously identified were extracted and made audible for the first time. The sound waves were extracted in radial directions, that is, outwards from the center. The signals were then resynthesized into the range of human hearing by scaling them upward by 57 and 58 octaves above their true pitch. Another way to put this is that they are being heard 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency. (A quadrillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000.) The radar-like scan around the image allows you to hear waves emitted in different directions. In the visual image of these data, blue and purple both show X-ray data captured by Chandra.
Click to hear => Data Sonification: Black Hole at the Center of the Perseus Galaxy Cluster (X-ray) (34 sec YouTube vid)
In addition to the Perseus galaxy cluster, a new sonification of another famous black hole is being released. Studied by scientists for decades, the black hole in Messier 87 (M87) gained celebrity status in science after the first release from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project in 2019. This new sonification does not feature the EHT data, but rather looks at data from other telescopes that observed M87 on much wider scales at roughly the same time. The image in visual form contains three panels that are, from top to bottom, X-rays from Chandra, optical light from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and radio waves from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile. The brightest region on the left of the image is where the black hole is found, and the structure to the upper right is a jet produced by the black hole. The jet is produced by material falling onto the black hole. The sonification scans across the three-tiered image from left to right, with each wavelength mapped to a different range of audible tones. Radio waves are mapped to the lowest tones, optical data to medium tones, and X-rays detected by Chandra to the highest tones. 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.
Maxine Waters wasn’t available for comment.
Figured you released a new tune...
Fascinating and scary.
Sounds of Saturn are very unsettling.
The true “music of the spheres”. Has a bit of a feel of 2001: A Space Odyssey to it.
I’m going to need better speakers.
Hmmm, I could actually use this as part of an ambient tune. Thanks for the ping!
+1
The jet is produced by material falling onto the black hole
“””
If you were closer it would sound like a wood chipper.
Sound travels somewhere around 1100 feet per second at 70 degrees Fahrenheit at sea level. I learned that in college. Just throwing that out there.
‘Eerie’ was exactly the word I thought of when I first heard this black hole “music.”
But your Saturn clip is just as eerie.
Why don’t these star gazers ever give us Mary Poppins? No, they’re just not happy unless they send a chill down your spine, lol.
If you play it backwards you can hear, “paulisdead”.
Saturn is the
Ancient Roman name for, Kronos,(the Greek God) who devoured his children, so it’s always had a dark energy according to some theologians, or occultists. Still, it’s a beautiful site if you have a telescope, and so is Jupiter with its moons.
That’s surprisingly about what I would have expected a black hole to sound like.
Actually, more like Forbidden Planet
Thanks LibWhacker. Sonification is the name of the game, and each generation plays it the same.
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