Market Desk (science): NASA has released a haunting audio clip of sound waves of a super massive black hole, located 250 million light-years from the earth.
The black hole is at the center of the Perseus cluster of galaxies and the acoustic waves coming from it have been transposed up 57 and 58 octaves, so it will be audibled to human hearing.
But this recent sonification has not only brought the recording up a whole lot of octaves, they’ve also added to the notes detected from the black hole, so we can get a sense of what they would sound like, ringing through intergalactic space. The result is an eerie one like many of the waves recorded from space and transposed into audio frequencies.
To be clear, these data were not sound waves to start with, like the Perseus audio but light in different frequencies. The radio data at the lowest frequencies have lowest pitch in sonification. Optical data hold the middle range and X-rays are at the top.
Turning visual data like these into sound can be a cool new way to experience cosmic phenomena and the method has also scientific value.
