NASA has released an eerie audio clip capturing the sound of waves rippling from a supermassive black hole, and it’s both haunting and scientifically fascinating.
The black hole sits at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster, located about 250 million light-years away. In a groundbreaking project, NASA took the sound waves emanating from the region and transposed them up 57 and 58 octaves, making them audible to human ears. The result is a ghostly howl, reminiscent of something from a sci-fi horror film.
While space is generally silent due to its vacuum, the Perseus cluster contains vast clouds of hot gas and plasma, which allow sound waves to travel. Back in 2003, astronomers first discovered acoustic waves rippling through this hot gas, the lowest note ever detected in the Universe. It was a B-flat, so deep it oscillated just once every 10 million years, far below human hearing.
In 2022, NASA “sonified” those waves, not only raising their pitch to an audible range but also adding new sound data. The waves were extracted radially from the black hole’s center and played in an anti-clockwise direction, allowing us to “hear” the black hole’s environment from all directions. The frequencies were boosted by factors of 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion, resulting in a truly otherworldly sound.
These sounds are more than just spooky entertainment. The waves help scientists understand how energy is distributed within galaxy clusters. As they move through the intracluster medium (the dense, hot gas between galaxies), they transfer energy and heat the surrounding plasma. This process may regulate star formation, shaping the evolution of galaxies over billions of years.
The detection of these waves was made possible through X-ray observations by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, which captured the glow of the hot gas in the cluster.
NASA also applied sonification techniques to another famous black hole; M87*, the first black hole ever directly imaged. Using data from Chandra, Hubble, and ALMA, scientists converted light from X-rays, optical, and radio wavelengths into sound. Though the M87* sonification is based on light rather than sound waves, it creates a rich, layered audio experience, with low-frequency radio waves at the bottom and high-pitched X-rays at the top.
By turning visual and acoustic data into sound, scientists are unlocking new ways to analyze cosmic phenomena, and giving us a haunting glimpse into the deep, dark universe.