Over the weekend, NASA shared audio of sound waves that astronomers had extracted from the black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster. The sounds were then amplified and mixed with other data to create this track:
The misconception that there is no sound in space originates because most space is a ~vacuum, providing no way for sound waves to travel. A galaxy cluster has so much gas that we've picked up actual sound. Here it's amplified, and mixed with other data, to hear a black hole! pic.twitter.com/RobcZs7F9e
— NASA Exoplanets (@NASAExoplanets) August 21, 2022
NASA clarified that it was not “intentionally made ominous, but the sound you hear is amplified a lot, and other sounds are interpreted from light data.”
“One of the motivations to create such data sonifications is the desire to share the science with more people,” the space agency added.
The black hole at the center of Perseus has been associated with sound since 2003 when astronomers discovered that pressure waves emitted from the black hole caused ripples in the cluster’s hot gas that could be translated into a note, NASA explained in May when it first released the audio. The note is too low for humans to hear, at around 57 octaves below middle C.
NASA resynthesized the sound waves into the range of human hearing by scaling them dozens of octaves above their true pitch. It also added more notes by translating astronomical data into sound.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
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