The Perseus star cluster is about 200 million lightyears away. It’s actually a cluster of not just stars but galaxies and itself is 11 million lightyears wide. At its heart sits a massive black hole. The black hole sends out unfathomably big pressure waves through the gasses that envelop Perseus and that gas allows the waves to be recorded as sounds. Nah, you say, space is silent. That’s true, in a vacuum. But where there are gasses, there can be sounds.
What kind of sounds? Eerie. Haunting. Lonely. Alien. (That’s the name of the new Radiohead record, by the way).
You can listen to it below, if you dare.
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
