As part
of NASA’s Black Hole Week, two new sonifications of well-known black holes have
been released.
- Two new sonifications of
well-known black holes have been released for NASA’s
Black Hole Week.
- The Perseus galaxy cluster was
made famous because of sound waves detected around its black hole by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory in
2003.
- Scanning like a radar around the
image, the data have been resynthesized and scaled up by 57 and 58 octaves
into the human hearing range.
- For M87, listeners can hear representations
of three different wavelengths of light — X-ray, optical, and radio —
around this giant black hole.
Black
Hole at the Center of the Perseus Galaxy Cluster
If a black hole erupts in space and no one is around to observe it, does it make a sound?
— NASA (@NASA) May 5, 2022
Not to worry; the @ChandraXray Observatory is here with new #BlackHoleWeek sonifications from galaxy clusters far, far away. Listen: https://t.co/yGu0RuP7TX pic.twitter.com/6rAgJafmAa
Since
2003, the black hole at the heart of the
Perseus galaxy cluster has been associated with sound. This is
because astronomers discovered that pressure waves emitted by the black hole
generated 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 2022.
New
sonification of the black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster.
Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/K.Arcand, SYSTEM Sounds (M. Russo, A. Santaguida)
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.
New sonification of the black hole at the center of galaxy M87. Credit:
NASA/CXC/SAO/K.Arcand, SYSTEM Sounds (M. Russo, A. Santaguida)
Black
Hole at the Center of Galaxy M87
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, or 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.
These
sonifications were led by the Chandra X-ray Center (CXC) and included as part
of NASA’s Universe of Learning (UoL) program with additional support from
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope/Goddard Space Flight Center. The collaboration
was driven by visualization scientist Kimberly Arcand (CXC), astrophysicist
Matt Russo, and musician Andrew Santaguida (both of the SYSTEMS Sound project).
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program. The
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science
from Cambridge Massachusetts and flight operations from Burlington,
Massachusetts. NASA’s Universe of Learning materials are based upon work
supported by NASA under cooperative agreement award number NNX16AC65A to the
Space Telescope Science Institute, working in partnership with Caltech/IPAC,
Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, and the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory.
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