Watch: NASA Turns "Light Echoes" From A Black Hole Into Sound

The mysteries of the black hole continue to baffle us despite extensive space exploration. In a new video, NASA made an attempt to explain the wonders of the frightening phenomenon. The "light echoes" from the black hole were converted into sound by the US Space agency on Friday.

The space agency took to Instagram to share the video. "Black holes are notorious for not letting light (such as radio, visible and X-rays) escape from them. However, surrounding material can produce intense bursts of electromagnetic radiation. As they travel outward, these busts of light can bounce off clouds of gas and dust in space, like how light beams from car's headlight will scatter off of fog," they wrote in the caption. 

In the video, the red circular bands are surrounded by a starry background. Blue bands highlight the inner and lower portions of the black hole system. "During the sonification, the cursor moves outward from the center of the image in a circle. As it passes through the light echoes detected in X-rays (seen as concentric rings in blue by Chandra and red by Swift in the image), there are tick-like sounds and changes in volume to denote the detection of X-rays and the variations in brightness," the caption further states. 

Watch the video here:

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According to NASA, the black hole in the video is about 7,800 light years away from Earth. The black hole has a mass between five and ten times that of the Sun, and it pulls material from a companion star in orbit around it, which is "funnelled into a disc that encircles the stellar-mass black hole," according to the researchers. V404 Cygni is a system that contains a black hole. A new sonification converts the "light echoes" from the V404 Cygni black hole into sound. 

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"NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory have imaged the X-ray light echoes around V404 Cygni," the space agency further said. Astronomers can calculate when these eruptions occurred because they know how fast light travels and have determined an accurate distance to this system. This data, along with other information, assists astronomers in learning more about dust clouds, such as their composition and distances.