NASA Releases New Audio Approximating Sound of Black Holes

NASA released new sonifications of two black holes on May 4 to coincide with their Black Hole Week.

The above video approximates noise from the black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster, which experts discovered had a pitch over a “million billion times deeper” than the limits of human hearing, making it too deep to be heard.

According to details in the release, experts from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory built on previously extracted astronomical data to produce the sound waves.

“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 … providing a medium for the sound waves to travel,” NASA said.

In addition to the Perseus galaxy cluster’s black hole, NASA also released a sonification of the black hole at the center of galaxy M87. Credit: NASA via Storyful

Video Transcript

[NO SPEECH]