How Black Hole Observations Were Turned Into Sound
Chandra X-ray Observatory observations of the Perseus galaxy cluster's black hole and M87's jet have been turned into sound by SYSTEM Sounds. The Chandra team explains how it was done.
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00:00 [music]
00:03 Visit Chandra's Beautiful Universe.
00:05 Black Hole Sonification Remix.
00:10 Since 2003, the black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster
00:15 has been associated with sound.
00:18 This is because astronomers discovered that pressure waves sent out by the black hole
00:23 caused ripples in the cluster's hot gas that could be translated into a note,
00:28 one that humans cannot hear, some 57 octaves below middle C.
00:33 Now, a new sonification brings more notes to this black hole sound machine.
00:39 This new sonification, that is, the translation of astronomical data into sound,
00:45 is being released for NASA's Black Hole Week this year.
00:50 In some ways, this sonification is unlike any other done before
00:54 because it revisits the actual sound waves discovered in data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.
01:01 The popular misconception that there is no sound in space
01:05 originates with the fact that most of space is essentially a vacuum,
01:09 providing no medium for sound waves to propagate through.
01:12 A galaxy cluster, on the other hand, has copious amounts of gas
01:16 that envelop the hundreds or even thousands of galaxies within it,
01:21 providing a medium for the sound waves to travel.
01:24 In this new sonification of Perseus,
01:27 the sound waves astronomers previously identified were extracted and made audible for the first time.
01:34 The sound waves were extracted in radial directions, that is, outwards from the center.
01:40 The signals were then re-synthesized into the range of human hearing
01:44 by scaling them upward by 57 and 58 octaves above their true pitch.
01:50 Another way to put this is that they are being heard 144 quadrillion
01:55 and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency.
02:00 A quadrillion is a 1 followed by 15 zeros.
02:04 The radar-like scan around the image allows you to hear waves emitted in different directions.
02:10 In the visual image of these data, blue and purple both show X-ray data captured by Chandra.
02:17 In addition to the Perseus galaxy cluster,
02:21 a new sonification of another famous black hole is being released.
02:25 Studied by scientists for decades, the black hole in Messier 87, or M87,
02:32 gained celebrity status in science after the first release from the Event Horizon Telescope, or EHT, in 2019.
02:41 This new sonification does not feature the EHT data,
02:45 but rather looks at data from other telescopes that observed M87 on much wider scales at roughly the same time.
02:53 The image in visual form contains three panels that are from top to bottom,
02:59 X-rays from Chandra, optical light from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope,
03:04 and radio waves from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile.
03:09 The brightest region on the left of the image is where the black hole is found,
03:14 and the structure to the upper right is a jet produced by the black hole.
03:19 The jet is produced by material falling onto the black hole.
03:24 The sonification scans across the three-tiered image from left to right,
03:28 with each wavelength mapped to a different range of audible tones.
03:33 Radio waves are mapped to the lowest tones, optical data to medium tones,
03:38 and X-rays detected by Chandra to the highest tones.
03:42 The brightest part of the image corresponds to the loudest portion of the sonification,
03:47 which is where astronomers find the 6.5 billion solar mass black hole that EHT imaged.
03:54 These two new black hole sonifications join the growing collection of these special products
04:00 created by the team at the Chandra X-ray Center and their colleagues.
04:04 For more on this ongoing project, please visit our website called A Universe of Sound.
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