NASA Video Shows 'Sound' of Black Hole Through Galaxy Cluster

NASA Video Shows 'Sound' of Black Hole Through Galaxy Cluster

250 million light-years distant from Earth, a supermassive black hole is said to have made some noise, according to recordings released by NASA.

More than 334,000 people have liked the unsettling 34-second video on Twitter, where 12.8 million people have watched it. The space agency's division that specializes in looking for "planets and life outside our solar system," NASA Exoplanets, posted it.

In the tweet that included the video, NASA Exoplanets stated: "The majority of space is a vacuum, thus sound waves cannot travel there, which is where the myth that there is no sound in space comes from. There is so much gas in a galaxy cluster that scientists have detected genuine sound. The sound of a black hole is amplified and combined with other data here."

The black hole in the Perseus cluster of galaxies is captured in the recording as it emits sound waves. Gas is abundant in this 11 million light-year wide cluster of galaxies.

The frequency was multiplied quadrillions of times and "other data" was blended in order to make the acoustic waves perceptible to humans by 57 and 58 octaves. The audio was initially made public in May and comes from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

The black hole in the heart of the Perseus galaxy cluster has been linked to sound since 2003, according to a NASA statement that was included with the object's first publication. This is due to the discovery by astronomers that pressure waves emitted by the black hole generated ripples in the heated gas of the cluster, which could be translated into a note 57 octaves below middle C that humans are unable to hear.

"More notes are now added to this black hole sound generator via a fresh sonification. This year's NASA Black Hole Week coincides with the introduction of a brand-new sonification, which is the conversion of astronomical data into sound."

The lowest note that people can hear is at a frequency of around one twentieth of a second, which is far lower than this.

An image of a "cannibal" coronal mass ejection (CME) that erupted from the Sun's surface on August 15 was published by NASA earlier this month. The massive cloud of hot plasma that Sunspot area 3078 unleashed was seen on camera by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.

In response to a warning from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center, Earth was struck by solar radiation and plasma on August 19. (SWPC).

Separately, on August 6, NASA was able to capture video of a comet known as "the filthy snowball" vaporizing after passing the Sun. The comet was shown to be dissipating in pictures taken by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, which is jointly run by NASA and the European Space Agency.