[imagesource: NASA]

Unless you’re a black hole in a galaxy cluster surrounded by hot gas, no one will ever be able to hear you scream in space.

Much of the universe is a vacuum, which doesn’t allow sound to travel at all, but in the right conditions, space can be hella noisy.

Take for example the Perseus galaxy cluster, at the centre of which is a supermassive black hole with a voice straight from the depths of hell.

NASA released the first track of the void, in a listenable form fit for human ears, and it really is rather unsettling.

To add an extra edge, the sound waves rippling through the gas and plasma in this cluster are 250 million light years from Earth.

No need to cup your ears:

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

Here it is again with more detail:

This is a pretty special moment, no matter how eerie it sounds:

“In some ways, this sonification is unlike any other done before… because it revisits the actual sound waves discovered in data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory,” NASA said in a statement.

“In this new sonification of Perseus, the sound waves astronomers previously identified were extracted and made audible for the first time.”

VICE reported that the black hole is a “real cosmic baritone” because the sound waves in their natural environment are a massive 57 octaves below the note middle C.

That might be helpful to know if you plan on harmonising with the void.

But mostly, it just shows how scientists had to raise the sound waves’ frequencies quadrillions of times (one quadrillion is a million billion, for perspective) just to make it audible to our human ears.

If you’re looking for more off-Earth earworms and space sonification, then you can listen to this real recording from Mars:

As well as the grooves of gravitational waves:

Lastly, this musician connects the patterns of music to the motions of planets, stars, and galaxies in the hopes of “letting the music of the cosmos be heard”:

Spotify needs to get in on these otherworldly beats.

[source:vice]