Sound does exist in space, NASA says—and some of it is pretty spooky. NASA's exoplanets team tweeted a 34-second clip of the sound of a black hole Sunday, saying that while sound waves can't travel in a vacuum, a "galaxy cluster has so much gas that we've picked up actual sound," USA Today reports. The new "sonification" of the black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster 240 million light years away was first released during Black Hole Week in May. "Astronomers discovered that pressure waves sent out by the black hole caused ripples in the cluster’s hot gas that could be translated into a note," NASA said.
Humans who got close to the black hole wouldn't be able to hear the actual sound—even if they avoided being destroyed in a process called "spaghettification"—because it is far too low. But NASA says it scaled the notes "upward by 57 and 58 octaves above their true pitch" putting them in the range of human hearing at "144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency." Many listeners described the sound as eerie or scary, with one Twitter user saying it "sounds like the wailing of billions of souls trapped forever in Hell," the Atlantic reports.
Kimberley Arcand, the project's principal investigator, likens the sound to "a beautiful Hans Zimmer score with the moody level set at really high." She tells the Washington Post that her team came up with the idea when they were looking at ways to help blind people access astronomical data. She says the project "sparked people's imagination" and could lead to future research. "The idea that there are these supermassive black holes sprinkled throughout the universe that are … belching out incredible songs is a very tantalizing thing," she says. (For Halloween 2020, NASA released a playlist of unsettling space sounds.)
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uBlock 
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Ghostery 
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