On Sunday, Nasa released an audio clip that depicts actual sound waves coming from the supermassive black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster, more than 200 meters light-years away. The sound is processed so that it can be heard by human ears. Nasa combined this with “other data” and reinforced it, saying the idea that there is no sound in space was a misconception. “The misconception that there is no sound in space comes from the fact that most of space is a vacuum, providing no way for sound waves to travel,” Nasa tweeted. “A cluster of galaxies has so much gas that we’ve captured real sound. Here it is amplified and mixed with other data, so you hear a black hole!” The clip, which sounds something like a cosmic growl or an ominous wind tunnel, caught the attention of the internet, with many saying it sounded exactly like what they imagined a supermassive black hole would sound like. Others turned to horror imagery to describe it, and some commented on the ethereal nature of the sound. “Somehow you knew a black hole would look like scary ghosts [of] gentle ocean waves,” wrote Twitter user Asher Honickman. Bringing up the sound of a Black Hole and it sounds like hundreds of tortured souls crawling down a lake of fire — sanyuyu hakusho🎨 (@cybxrart) August 22, 2022 Some have turned to pop culture to describe it, with references to the classic Event Horizon and the horror film Silent Hill. One Twitter user thought it sounded like Pink Floyd’s Echoes and another joked it was new music from Icelandic singer Björk. And a section of the internet felt it sounded more like bodily functions than anything else. “It sounds just like my stomach at 6.30pm when the evening shows have finished. #Hungryinspace,” wrote Natasha Stenbock. The sound itself comes from Nasa’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and was released in May. The agency then described it as the result of pressure waves emitted by the black hole, saying it was 57 octaves below middle C, meaning scientists had to raise the frequency four billion times to make it audible. “The astronomers found that the pressure waves emitted by the black hole caused ripples in the cluster’s hot gas that could be translated into a note—something humans can’t hear about 57 octaves below middle C,” they reported in a statement. “In some ways, this sounding is unlike any other done before … because it reexamines the actual sound waves discovered in data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.”
