They turn the echoes of a black hole into sound, and the result is creepy.

When scientists get together with musicians, the most curious things can happen. From turning a web into a musical instrument to turning a Martian sunrise into a melody. Now they also managed to guess What does the echo of a black hole sound like?. These echoes have nothing to do with the concept we are used to. At least not that much. Actually, they are not a sound thing. However, a group of scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)in collaboration with a group of musicologists, managed to make transformations that led to a completely creepy.

They didn’t do it for the simple reason that listen to the black holeno matter how curious it may be. In fact, his goal was to get more data to reconstruct what happens in the vicinity of these astronomical phenomena. Yes, something was already known, but with the data they received, they much more information.

But before seeing how they managed to transform echo from a black holethere is something much more important that needs to be answered: what are these echoes?

Echoes of a black hole

Before talking about the echo, it is worth remembering what a black hole is. This is a finite region of space in which so much mass accumulates that it gravitational attraction He doesn’t stop anything from escaping him. Not even light.

In some cases, when a black hole feeding surrounding matter, it can radiate x-ray bursts which bounce off, creating a sort of echo of the gas they were extracting. This causes the black hole’s extreme environment to briefly catch fire. Until recently, they were located only in Milky Way two black holes capable of generating these echoes.

However, our Milky Way galaxy is known to contain tens of millions of black holes. It is logical to assume that not all of them were detected, but this is what the models say. Therefore, it is more than likely that there are more undetected echoes. New methods of detection will be required, so the authors of the study, now published in Astrophysical journal decided to develop a new technique, which they called reverb.

What did you find with the reverb?

This new mechanism allowed them to find eight new binaries which generate echoes when a black hole consumes a nearby star. With more of these echoes, they were able to compare them with each other and extract new data about their performance.

As explained in a statement from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the first thing they saw was that black holes pass through State lasted, “the excitation of a corona of high-energy photons along with a jet of relativistic particles that is launched at a speed close to the speed of light.” Then “the black hole emits a final burst of high energy before going into a state soft from little energy“.

These discoveries are very interesting because “they could help explain how the largest supermassive black holes at the center of a galaxy can eject particles on a cosmic scale shape the formation of the galaxy.

Turning echoes into music

Once they discovered the echoes of black holes, these scientists collaborated with music composition experts to turn them into music. To do this, they observed the frequencies of the radiation emitted by this phenomenon and correlated them with sounds. Thus, lower frequencies corresponded to lower tones and the tallest with the sharpest. The result is an eerie tune, as well as a very interesting way of displaying these black hole echo.

And the fact is, they can actually help astronomers navigate the inhospitable environment of a black hole in the same way that acoustic echoes help navigate space. the bats. Echoes are time delays between light emitted directly from the corona and light from the corona reflected off the accretion disk of gas and dust. Therefore, comparing the time the telescope receives light from the corona with the time it receives the X-ray echo gives the estimate distance between the corona and the accretion disk.

Watching these time delays change can show how the black hole’s corona and disk evolve as the black hole evolves. consumes the material around it. The data received by telescopes is enough, but converting it into sound makes it even more tangible. It may not have been necessary, but it makes the investigation even more interesting. Also, admit it, you probably came to this article to hear the tune. Adding these details makes science accessible to more people. And publishing research is almost as important as doing it.