NASA has released a haunting audio clip of sound waves rippling out of a supermassive black hole, located 250 million light-years away.
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 they’re audible to human hearing.
The result (below), released by NASA in May, is a sort of unearthly (obviously) howling that, if we’re honest, sounds not only spooky, but a little bit angry.
It’s the first time these sound waves have been extracted and made audible.
So what’s going on here? We might not be able to hear sound in space, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any.
In 2003, astronomers detected something truly astonishing: acoustic waves propagating through the copious amounts of gas surrounding the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Perseus galaxy cluster, which is now renowned for its eerie wails.