Discoveries

August 29, 2022

When Space Screams

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The slogan of the original “Alien” movie read, “In space, no one can hear you scream.”

While sound cannot conventionally travel in space – unlike on Earth – there is a scary cacophony coming from a supermassive black hole located about 250 million light-years away from Earth, Newsweek reported.

NASA researchers recently released a 34-second video clip on Twitter containing an eerie sound emanating from the Perseus cluster of galaxies. The clip was originally posted in May but it gained more attention when it was reposted last week on the agency’s Twitter account for its exoplanet programs.

Many netizens were in awe of the peculiar sound but others pointed out that the celestial body sounded like “a billion souls being tortured,” according to Insider.

The agency explained that the black hole was first discovered in 2003 and has ever since been associated with sound.

“This is because 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,” it wrote in the original May post.

NASA originally picked up data from the ripples using its Chandra X-ray Observatory but the actual sounds cannot be heard by the human ear.

To make them audible, they had to amplify the sounds 144 and 288 quadrillion times above their original frequency to get them from their true pitch to something that can be heard.

The results, however, were something akin to “cosmic horror,” as another Twitter user quipped.

This story originally appeared in the August 29, 2022 newsletter, The Little Country That Could.