Blackhole Sonification: NASA Transforms Light Echoes into Enchanting Sounds

Various forms of light, such as radio, visible, and X-rays, are unable to escape black holes once they're pulled into their monstrous darkness. However, we see glimpses of these devoured lights since the surrounding material can emit powerful bursts of electromagnetic radiation.

This, in turn, splashes a much-needed color on these black holes, making them appear like a stunning firework display.

Similar to how headlight beams from an automobile may scatter off the fog, these light bursts can bounce off clouds of gas and particles in space as they move outward, according to NASA.

But what if we turn things up from these bursts and transform them into music? Fortunately, NASA has done that.

Light Echoes

These "light echoes" from the black hole V404 Cygni are converted into sound using a new sonification technique. A black hole with a mass between five and ten times that of the Sun is present in the V404 Cygni system, which is around 7,800 light-years from Earth.

This black hole is so voracious that it is also consuming matter from a companion star orbiting around it. The material is directed into the stellar-mass black hole's ring-shaped disc.

This substance periodically releases bursts of radiation, including X-rays. The X-rays are dispersed outward at different angles by the gas and dust clouds between V404 Cygni and our planet.

Images of the X-ray light echoes in and around V404 Cygni have been captured by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory.

Astronomers can establish when these eruptions took place because they have precisely measured the distance to this system and the speed at which light travels, as per NASA.

Astronomers can also learn more about the dust clouds' composition and distances thanks to this new data.

Swift and Chandra

The X-ray information from Swift and Chandra is converted into sound by V404 Cygni's sonification process. The image's center is where the pointer is located during sonification, and it moves in a circle outward.

There are tick-like sounds and loudness shifts to indicate the detection of X-rays as well as the variations in brightness as it passes through the light echoes detected in X-rays.

Lower-frequency tones represent Swift data, whilst Chandra data use higher-frequency tones to distinguish between the two telescopes' data. The image also contains optical data from the Digitized Sky Survey that displays background stars in addition to the X-rays.

A musical note is produced for each star in optical light. The brightness of the star affects the note's pitch and volume, as noted by NASA.

The "A Universe of Sound" website contains additional sonifications of astronomical data as well as more details on the method if you want more black hole sounds.

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Written by Jace Dela Cruz