Chandra X-ray Observatory observations of the Perseus galaxy cluster's black hole and M87's jet have been turned into sound by SYSTEM Sounds. The Chandra team explains how it was done.
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00:00Visit Chandra's Beautiful Universe
00:05Black Hole Sonification Remix
00:10Since 2003, the black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster
00:15has been associated with sound. This is because astronomers
00:20discovered that pressure waves sent out by the black hole caused ripples in the cluster's
00:25hot gas that could be translated into a note, one that humans cannot hear,
00:30some 57 octaves below middle C. Now, a new sonification
00:35brings more notes to this black hole sound machine.
00:40This new sonification, that is, the translation of astronomical data into sound,
00:45is being released for NASA's Black Hole Week this year.
00:50In some ways, this sonification is unlike any other done before
00:55because it revisits the actual sound waves discovered in data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.
01:00The popular misconception that there is no sound in space
01:05originates with the fact that most of space is essentially a vacuum,
01:10providing no medium for sound waves to propagate through. A galaxy cluster, on the other hand,
01:15has copious amounts of gas that envelop the hundreds or even thousands of galaxies within it,
01:20providing a medium for the sound waves to travel.
01:25In this new sonification of Perseus, the sound waves astronomers previously identified
01:30were extracted and made audible for the first time.
01:35The sound waves were extracted in radial directions, that is, outwards from the center.
01:40The signals were then re-synthesized into the range of human hearing
01:45by scaling them upward by 57 and 58 octaves above their true pitch.
01:50Another way to put this is that they are being heard 144 quadrillion
01:55and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency.
02:00A quadrillion is a 1 followed by 15 zeros.
02:05A radar-like scan around the image allows you to hear waves emitted in different directions.
02:10In the visual image of these data, blue and purple both show X-ray data captured by Chandra.
02:15In addition to the Perseus galaxy cluster,
02:20a new sonification of another famous black hole is being released.
02:25Studied by scientists for decades, the black hole in Messier 87,
02:30or M87, gained celebrity status in science
02:35after the first release from the Event Horizon Telescope, or EHT, in 2019.
02:40This new sonification does not feature the EHT data,
02:45but rather looks at data from other telescopes that observed M87
02:50on much wider scales at roughly the same time.
02:55The image in visual form contains three panels that are from top to bottom,
03:00X-rays from Chandra, optical light from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope,
03:05and radio waves from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile.
03:10The brightest region on the left of the image is where the black hole is found,
03:15and the structure to the upper right is a jet produced by the black hole.
03:20The jet is produced by material falling onto the black hole.
03:25The sonification scans across the three-tiered image from left to right,
03:30with each wavelength mapped to a different range of audible tones.
03:35Radio waves are mapped to the lowest tones, optical data to medium tones,
03:40and X-rays detected by Chandra to the highest tones.
03:45This image shows the loudest portion of the sonification,
03:50which is where astronomers find the 6.5 billion solar mass black hole that EHT imaged.
03:55These two new black hole sonifications join the growing collection of these special products
04:00created by the team at the Chandra X-ray Center and their colleagues.
04:05For more on this ongoing project, please visit our website called A Universe of Sound.
04:10NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
04:40NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology