Iran Press/ Sci & Tech: The US space agency tweeted what it called a remixed sonification of the black hole at the center of a galaxy cluster known as Perseus, which lies about 240 million light-years away from Earth.
What does a black hole sound like? Both “creepy” and “ethereally beautiful,” according to people who have listened to an audio clip posted on Twitter by NASA.
The 34-second clip set social media ablaze, with many people gobsmacked that anything, let alone what sounds like an eerie, guttural moan, could escape a black hole.
But the idea that there is no sound in space is actually a “popular misconception,” the agency said. While most of the space is a vacuum, with no medium for sound waves to travel through, a galaxy cluster “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,” it explained.
The clip, which NASA described as a “Black Hole Remix,” was first released in early May to coincide with NASA’s Black Hole Week – but a tweet by the NASA exoplanets team took off on Sunday the clip being viewed by more than 13 million times.
The sound waves were discovered in 2003 when, after 53 hours of observation, researchers with NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory “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.”
203
Read More:
James Webb Space Telescope breaks its record by capturing images of furthest galaxy
