NASA has released audio of the inside of a black hole for humans to hear for the very first time and it is truly one of the most terrifying sounds ever to vibrate my eardrums.
In a new edition of I Wish I Didn’t Know This, turns out black holes actually do make noise despite the common misconception that a black hole is a whole lot of nothingness.
So black holes are both nothing and something and I for one want zero to do with any of it.
The audio, gorgeously titled “Black Hole Remix”, is the sound waves extracted outward from the centre of the black hole, amplified, mixed with other data and changed tone — the real noise is way too low for us to hear. For the music nerds in the room, it’s roughly 57 octaves below middle C.
The sound was recorded from the Perseus galaxy cluster 240 million lightyears away. Remember, this is what scientists say is, in relative terms, extremely close to Earth.
Normally space stuff and feeling insignificant helps with my anxiety but for some reason, not today!
So what is a black hole? And why are they so scary?
A black hole is an area of space where the gravitational pull is so strong it traps everything and even light cannot get out. They usually form from dying stars.
They can be small, just roughly 20 times the size of our sun, or they can be “supermassive” and have masses that are more than 1 million suns together.
Because light can’t escape black holes are invisible, cool, but space telescopes with fancy technology can find them so NASA knows where to point the microphone.
Anyway, listen if you dare but PEDESTRIAN.TV takes no responsibility for any related insomnia.
The misconception that there is no sound in space originates because most space is a ~vacuum, providing no way for sound waves to travel. A galaxy cluster has so much gas that we’ve picked up actual sound. Here it’s amplified, and mixed with other data, to hear a black hole! pic.twitter.com/RobcZs7F9e
— NASA Exoplanets (@NASAExoplanets) August 21, 2022
I’m just praying this doesn’t become a TikTok viral sound.
