NASA has captured the actual sound of a black hole

August 24, 2022 Alan Cross 0 Comments 1 min read

Yes, yes. I know that in space no one can hear your scream. (If you don’t get the reference, you need to spend more time with Ridley Scott movies) but that doesn’t mean that sound doesn’t exist in the vacuum of the universe. As proof, NASA has released the sound of a black hole–specifically a black hole in the Perseus galaxy cluster, collected by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

I quote: “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.”

The misconception that there is no sound in space originates because most space is a ~vacuum, providing no way for sound waves to travel. A galaxy cluster has so much gas that we've picked up actual sound. Here it's amplified, and mixed with other data, to hear a black hole! pic.twitter.com/RobcZs7F9e
— NASA Exoplanets (@NASAExoplanets) August 21, 2022

Chris Cornell would have loved this. Meanwhile, you can bet that Matt Bellamy is already working on sampling this for his next song about supermassive black holes.

Here’s another example.