00:00Visit Chandra's Beautiful Universe
00:05Black Hole Sonification Remix
00:08Since 2003, the black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster
00:14has been associated with sound.
00:18This is because astronomers discovered that pressure waves sent out by the black hole
00:23caused ripples in the cluster's hot gas that could be translated into a note,
00:27one that humans cannot hear, some 57 octaves below middle sea.
00:33Now, a new sonification brings more notes to this black hole sound machine.
00:39This new sonification, that is, the translation of astronomical data into sound,
00:45is being released for NASA's Black Hole Week this year.
00:49In some ways, this sonification is unlike any other done before
00:54because it revisits the actual sound waves discovered in data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.
01:01The popular misconception that there is no sound in space
01:04originates with the fact that most of space is essentially a vacuum,
01:09providing no medium for sound waves to propagate through.
01:12A galaxy cluster, on the other hand, has copious amounts of gas
01:16that enveloped the hundreds or even thousands of galaxies within it,
01:21providing a medium for the sound waves to travel.
01:24In this new sonification of Perseus,
01:27the sound waves astronomers previously identified
01:30were extracted and made audible for the first time.
01:34The sound waves were extracted in radial directions,
01:37that is, outwards from the center.
01:39The signals were then re-synthesized into the range of human hearing
01:44by scaling them upward by 57 and 58 octaves above their true pitch.
01:50Another way to put this is that they are being heard
01:52144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency.
02:00A quadrillion is a 1 followed by 15 zeros.
02:03The radar-like scan around the image
02:06allows you to hear waves emitted in different directions.
02:11In the visual image of these data,
02:13blue and purple both show X-ray data captured by Chandra.
02:17In addition to the Perseus galaxy cluster,
02:21a new sonification of another famous black hole is being released.
02:26Studied by scientists for decades,
02:28the black hole in Messier 87, or M87,
02:31gained celebrity status in science
02:34after the first release from the Event Horizon Telescope,
02:38or EHT, in 2019.
02:41This new sonification does not feature the EHT data,
02:45but rather looks at data from other telescopes
02:48that observed M87 on much wider scales
02:51at roughly the same time.
02:53The image in visual form contains three panels
02:57that are from top to bottom,
02:59X-rays from Chandra,
03:01optical light from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope,
03:04and radio waves from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile.
03:09The brightest region on the left of the image
03:11is where the black hole is found,
03:14and the structure to the upper right
03:16is a jet produced by the black hole.
03:19The jet is produced by material falling onto the black hole.
03:23The sonification scans across the three-tiered image
03:27from left to right,
03:28with each wavelength mapped to a different range of audible tones.
03:33Radio waves are mapped to the lowest tones,
03:36optical data to medium tones,
03:38and X-rays detected by Chandra to the highest tones.
03:42The brightest part of the image
03:43corresponds to the loudest portion of the sonification,
03:46which is where astronomers find
03:49the 6.5 billion solar mass black hole
03:52that EHT imaged.
03:54These two new black hole sonifications
03:57join the growing collection of these special products
04:00created by the team at the Chandra X-ray Center
04:02and their colleagues.
04:04For more on this ongoing project,
04:06please visit our website called A Universe of Sound.
04:09A Universe of Sound
04:39A Universe of Sound
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