The Haunting Remix By NASA Gives You A Taste Of A Black Hole's Sound

A soundtrack brought to you by the Perseus galaxy cluster. The remix NASA released during black hole week, back in May, will haunt you for the rest of your life. 

The agency created a melody out of the soundwaves of a gigantic black hole more than 200 million light-years away. Black holes are located in the center of what's known as the Perseus galaxy cluster, a magnificent bundle of galaxies that covers an area of 11 million light years.

Despite Perseus' immense magnitude and its galaxies' breathtaking beauty, astronomers have been more intrigued by ... all that hot gas. Exactly because of the space clouds, we can hear the sounds of something we can barely imagine: the massive black hole at the center of Perseus. 

It's probably exactly what one expects a black hole to sound like: Eerie, scary, mysterious, maybe something Thom Yorke can sample. If you listen carefully, you might even hear a sense of pain.

As for the black hole week soundtrack, here there are the specifics. The void-like interior of Perseus has been discovered to emit pressure waves decades ago. As the waves pass through all the surrounding hot gas in the area, the ripples can be translated into sound. 

It is best to think of sound waves as vibrations of air -- or, more precisely, the vibrations of things within the air. In Earth's atmosphere, our ears can capture those vibrations and turn them into a listenable noise, whereas in space, things are a little different.

The vacuum of space prevents sound waves from traveling. It is for this reason that space is often considered to be silent. It is not because cosmic objects don't make sounds that there is silence. The waves don't have anything to vibrate.

In contrast, Perseus' black hole gets past the space vacuum sound barrier since it's so close to the cluster's gas. In addition to creating sound waves, hot gas ripples can produce vibrations as well.

The Chandra X-ray Observatory converted astronomical data from gassy ripples into normal sound waves in 2003. The black hole's song was hampered by a major obstacle for a long time. A 57-octave note was detected in Perseus' abyss after scientists completed the sonification process. 

NASA's remix solves this problem because our ears cannot hear that. It is appropriate that the agency made the 57 and 58 octaves louder in honor of black hole week, so we can all hear the call of the void once and for all.

'In another way, NASA says, 'they have been amplifedamplified by 144 quadrillions and 288 quadrillion times their original frequency.'

Additionally, NASA released another, much less ominous, black hole sonification. The picture shows the abyss near the center of the galaxy Messier 87, aka the famous black hole that was first photographed.

Despite its beauty, this track is not exactly a pure sonification of astronomical data, as Perseus' void was. In addition to Chandra X-rays, Hubble optical light, and radio waves from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile, it is derived from three different sources of data. 

An X-ray plays high tones, an optical light plays medium tones, and a radio wave plays the lowest tones.