Do you know the sound of a black hole? NASA does. The agency has recently released an audio recording of a black hole and the first thing I thought was: Wait a minute! What happened to all that talk about space being a vacuum and therefore being no medium for sound?

Whenever I find the news to be disturbing, I try to get more information about it. This is what I have found so far about the sounding black hole: according to NASA, “the popular misconception that there is no sound in space originates with the fact that most of space is essentially a vacuum, providing no medium for sound waves to propagate through.”

Misconception? Wait a…ok, ok, let´s read their statement further: “A galaxy cluster, on the other hand, has copious amounts of gas that envelop the hundreds or even thousands of galaxies within it, providing a medium for the sound waves to travel.”

Gas is the medium. Got it or…. have I? Actually, I still had a lot of questions, such as: how come the travelling sound waves became audible by human ears? And, most important of all: how do they sound?

Again, a little research can do wonders for you: the process of data sonification consists in re-synthesizing the sound waves and scaling them up in order to make it possible for human ears to hear them. According to NASA, “another way to put this is that they are being heard 144 quadrillions and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency.”

Anything involving quadrillions is simply too much for my mind to imagine, but the whole process is so fascinating! Music is indeed everywhere.

I couldn’t help wondering that all this talk about how this “new thing” sounds is quite similar to describing a new genre. People will get it sooner or later. Just give them time to process it.

And, as for my last question, click here and find out how this music without music sounds.

Be seeing you!

G.F.