The recent images coming from the James Webb Telescope are stunning and awe-inspiring. But while they are a visual delight, the vast vacuum of outer space isn’t a multi-sensory experience. It’s silent and cold. So Nasa have risen to the challenge of creating engaging experiences as a replacement. They’re converting gravitational and cosmic light waves to sound waves to improve our appreciation of what is really going on out there. One of the latest observations to undergo this sonification treatment is the light emitted when dust is swallowed by a black hole.
The study detected X-rays (a form of electromagnetic radiation, similar to visible light) originating from materials being dragged into the supermassive black hole at the centre of our Milky Way. The twinkling of X-rays reflected from the surrounding gas clouds was then transformed by Nasa into a musical equivalent. The result is as strange as it is beautiful. If seeing is believing, then hearing is experiencing.
The new publication was led by the University of Strasbourg and the X-rays were detected by the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer satellite – a joint US and Italian mission.
The rays were emitted when gas and dust approached the black hole and passed the point of no return. The dust particles were accelerated to high speeds under the gargantuan gravitational pull of the black hole, ripped apart into constituent ions and electrons that were then whipped up to near the speed of light, causing the emission of a flare of high-energy light at the very edge of the dark abyss.
Those X-rays, being massless and unaffected by the black hole’s super gravity, were able to escape outwards and bounced around among the clouds that orbit the black hole. These reflections are what we “hear” in the video. It’s one of many sonifications of data from objects in space that Nasa has produced to make astronomical images accessible to visually impaired people, and to deepen our connection with the physics we are observing. Search “singing black holes” to find the recording or “Nasa sonifications” to find others in the Cosmic Harmonies series.
This article is from New Humanist's autumn 2023 issue. Subscribe now.
