WASHINGTON – NASA has released an audio clip of sound waves from a black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster, located more than 200 million light-years away.
“Sound waves previously identified by astronomers have been extracted and made audible for the first time,” NASA’s Exoplanet Team tweeted on Monday.
“The misconception that there is no sound in space stems from the fact that most of space is a vacuum, which gives sound waves no chance to propagate,” it says.
“A cluster of galaxies contains so much gas that we actually picked up sound.”
NASA said the black hole has been associated with sound since 2003, when astronomers discovered that the pressure waves it emitted “caused ripples in the cluster’s hot gas that could be translated into a note.”
But humans couldn’t hear it because its frequency was too low.
Astronomers remixed the sound and resynthesized the signals, which NASA says can be heard “144 trillion and 288 trillion times higher than their original frequency.”
The clip was first posted in May, but the tweet from the Exoplanets program team ignited social media with 14.6 million views midday Wednesday.
“Filtering the audio and adjusting the speed a bit almost makes it sound like something is actually speaking…Although it’s an unrecognizable language,” one Twitter account said.
The insider said, “It’s pretty scary.”
“No surprise, the sound is terrifying,” USA Today said.
