Most of us understand space to be a vacuum, an endless dark void that sound waves cannot pass through. In films like Interstellar, or Pixar’s ‘Light Year’ if that’s more your style, space is deadly silent. However, this isn’t quite the truth. Although the sounds of space are not able to be heard by the human ear, they do technically exist. The vast amounts of gas that surround a galaxy allow a medium for sound waves to pass. About six month ago (May 2022), NASA released a sound-clip produced by a Blackhole 250 million light years away from earth. In order for us to hear the clip, NASA transposed the sound up by about 57 octaves. It sounds just how one might expect; eerily haunting.
Most of us understand space to be a vacuum, an endless dark void that sound waves cannot pass through. In films like Interstellar, or Pixar’s ‘Light Year’ if that’s more your style, space is deadly silent. However, this isn’t quite the truth. Although the sounds of space are not able to be heard by the human ear, they do technically exist. The vast amounts of gas that surround a galaxy allow a medium for sound waves to pass. About six month ago (May 2022), NASA released a sound-clip produced by a Blackhole 250 million light years away from earth. In order for us to hear the clip, NASA transposed the sound up by about 57 octaves. It sounds just how one might expect; eerily haunting.
The Perseus cluster is one of the largest objects in the Universe, containing thousands of galaxies within it. In 2003, astronomers at NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory discovered the black hole at the centre of the Perseus cluster was sending out pressure waves, causing ripples in the clouds of hot gas surrounding it. This could be translated into sound notes, but they were 57 octaves below middle C. This is obviously un-hearable to the human ear; we can hear a maximum of 10 octaves, with 20-40Hz at the lower end and 10.24 KHz being the absolute highest that human hearing is capable of (most of us probably can’t hear up to this octave though). NASA have developed sonification technology, which is the ability to transform astronomical data into sounds, that can allow us to finally hear the sounds of space. This transposing technology means we are hearing sounds 144 quadrillion times above their true pitch. To put this into perspective, 1 quadrillion is a million billions…
Photo by Jacob Granneman on Unsplash- Black Hole
Messier-87, or M87, is supergiant elliptical Galaxy in the constellation Virgo. The nucleus of M87 is a black hole about 55 million light-years away from Earth. It is one of the largest black holes of any galaxy, producing a staggering amount of radio energy. It is a bright object in the sky as a result, making it a popular target among astronomers, new and more experienced. M87 made the news in 2019, with the Event Horizon Telescope project (EHT) capturing a revolutionary, first-time image of a black hole in the M87 galaxy. Sonification of this black hole has been released, using a different method to the Perseus black hole. Visual data has been captured from various telescopes, using a combination of light, x-ray and radio waves. These images are translated into sound by scanning across from left to right; radio waves are played as the lowest tones and X-rays play as the highest audible tones, is accordance to their frequency ranges in the electromagnetic spectrum. Short plucking tones are played for the small dots of x-ray light that represent surrounding stars.
Black holes aren’t the objects in space to produce sound. Seismic waves, of magnitudes no bigger than 2.0, were identified for the first time on Mars after four ricks hit the planet between 2020 and 2021. NASA’s Insight Lander, who touched down on the planet in 2018, picked up these waves known as ‘marsquakes’. The
first detected impact of rocks occurred on September 5th 2021, with the meteor violently entering the atmosphere and splitting into 3 segments that left craters on the surface of the planet. Surprisingly, the sound produced was not reflective of the intensity of the collision, and was instead comparable to the sound of a drop of water or wobbling plastic. Nasa explains that this strange phenomenon occurs in the atmosphere of mars because the bass sounds arrive before those of higher frequency. Going back through data collected prior, NASA was able to identify past collisions and find their points of impact on Mars. It is likely there have been many unrecorded collisions of meteors onto the planet, which resides next to the solar system’s main asteroid belt. Additionally, the atmosphere surrounding mars is only 1% of the density of Earth’s, meaning rocks can pass through without decomposing and can crash onto the surface. With all this in mind, scientists are confused why the Insight Lander has be unable to detect more seismic waves and collisions. The seismometer is able to capture activity over 1,300 miles away, so it doesn’t seem to be an issue with the instrument. They believe disturbances such as wind and atmosphere changes may be preventing the robot from picking up all occurrences. Insight will shut down in the next year due to dust on its solar panels.
The sonifications were led by the Chandra X-ray Center (CXC) as part of NASA’s Universe of Learning (UoL) program, with support from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope/Goddard Space Flight Center. Head over to the “Chandre X-Ray Observatory” Youtube channel for videos of the awesome work going on there, particularly the “sonification” playlist for a collection of all the sound clips and see for yourself what kind of noises are occurring in space!
