The painful sound from a black hole allows humans to hear the sounds of space 240 million light-years away

Is there sound in space? New audio from NASA provides some insight – and the answer is heart-wrenching.

the sound , Released May 4is a black hole from the center Perseus Galaxy Group, which is a huge space structure spanning 11 million light-years and located about 240 million light-years from Earth. Astronomers created the audible sound by recording pressure waves sent by the black hole through the cluster’s hot gas. In their original form, these waves cannot be heard by the human ear, so the scientists extracted the sound waves and increased them by 57 and 58 octaves.

“In some ways, this sonication is unlike anything else that has been done before,” NASA said in a statement. “…[The sound waves] It is heard 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than its original frequency.”

Colliding with human frequencies, the sounds of a black hole are almost like the noodles of a frightening ghost or the deep ocean calls of a century of whales.

While this space-specific sound is new, NASA has linked the Perseus galaxy cluster to the sound since 2003. Galaxy clusters like Perseus are the largest gravitationally bound objects in the universe containing hundreds of galaxies, huge clouds of hot gas that reach more than 180 million degrees Fahrenheit and the mysterious dark matter. All these substances create a medium for the transmission of sound waves.

Besides sonicating Perseus, NASA scientists also sonicated another famous black hole located at Messier 87, or M87.

Unlike the Perseus black hole, this one has a much higher pitch, and can best be described as ambient music with bells of light. The visualization of the sound released by NASA is absolutely stunning, as it contains scans of the black hole taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, optical light from the Hubble Space Telescope and radio waves from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile. It also contains an image of the location of the black hole and an image of a jet produced by M87.

The audio and video files were released during NASA’s Black Hole Week from May 2-6. During that time, NASA released various visualizations and information about black holes as part of a “celebration of celestial bodies with such intense gravity that not even light can escape them…”

Lee Cohen

Lee Cohen is a social media producer and popular reporter for CBS News, focusing on social justice issues.