Yale astronomers weigh in on newly captured sound emitted by black hole – Yale Daily News

NASA has extracted the sound waves from a black hole 250 million light years away and made them audible.

Sammi Kwon 11:06 pm, Sep 07, 2022

Contributing Reporter

Jessai Flores, Staff Illustrator

NASA released a groundbreaking audio clip of the soundwaves emitted by the black hole in the Perseus Galaxy Cluster, located 250 million light years away from Earth.

Astronomers have been aware of the sound waves emitted by the black hole at the center of the Perseus Galaxy Cluster for nearly 20 years, since they were first captured by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory in 2003. However, the sonification the conversion of astronomical data into sound is a recent development by researchers at NASA. The process involves sound waves being extracted radially, outwards from the center of the black hole, and then transposed up by 57 to 58 octaves to make them audible to the human ear. While the audio is fascinating in itself, it also provides another dimension of data in investigating black holes, star formation and galaxies for researchers. Yale astronomers underscored the significance of this development.

It provides sort of a unique way to study the environments of black holes, said astronomy professor and department chair Priyamvada Natarajan. Right around the vicinity of the black hole, there is a medium, theres a lot of gas sitting around. And this gas reverberates, so you can see these sound waves, and thats the sonification project.

The black hole at the center of the Perseus Galaxy Cluster has been investigated ever since researchers at NASA realized that it emitted pressure waves that would interact with gasses around it and produce sound waves. These sound waves are not audible to the human ear without modification, but now that NASA transposed the waves they can be listened to, interpreted and analyzed.

The waves are indicators of how energy from the black hole is interacting with the surrounding gasses. Energy propagating from the black hole interacts with gasses in the form of sound waves, and this interaction heats gasses up. Star formation relies heavily on heated gasses, so the sonification project and investigation of sound waves could help researchers better understand the formation of stars.

The general research used for data like this is to understand the role supermassive black holes play in regulating the star formation in the universe, said Michael Tremmel, post-doctoral associate of astronomy.

For researchers, the importance of this development stems from the tangible representation of the way black holes, specifically their sound waves, interact with the surrounding space.

Its not so much directly the black hole. Its more of the effect the black hole has on its surroundings, said Frank van den Bosch, Yale professor of astronomy and physics, whose research focuses on cosmology and galaxy formation.

The sonification project has provided a new way for astronomers to interact with data in different forms. While astronomers are familiar with visual forms, the project has provided data that will expand the ways in which researchers can learn about black holes. In addition to information, the sonification project also provides further accessibility of data in non-visual forms.

When you hear something, you learn about it in a very different way, no matter how many different times youve looked at it, said Kimberly Arcand, data visualizer and science communicator at NASA. It would be fantastic to be able to capture the sound waves of other black holes in the universe.

Albert Einstein first hypothesized the existence of black holes in 1916.

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Yale astronomers weigh in on newly captured sound emitted by black hole - Yale Daily News