Hear The Universe Roar: NASA Reveals Haunting Audio From A Supermassive Black Hole

NASA has captured and released the sound waves produced by a supermassive black hole located at the center of the Perseus cluster of galaxies in a groundbreaking discovery. These acoustic waves, first detected in 2003, were originally too low in frequency for human hearing. The lowest note, a B-flat, is over 57 octaves below middle C, with a frequency of 10 million years, making it the lowest pitch ever detected in the universe.

NASA has only recently sonified these waves and cranked them up 57 and 58 octaves, making them audible to the human ear for the first time. The result is haunting, otherworldly audio that sounds scary and angry. It hears like cosmic howls across the intergalactic space.

This process demonstrates that, although sound cannot travel naturally through vacuum space, it can propagate through dense gas clouds surrounding objects such as black holes. The haunting wails of the Perseus cluster now bring a rare glimpse into the cosmic symphony of the universe, capturing the imagination of scientists and the public.

According to NASA, in this 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.