![]() ![]() But this is space putting on a little performance, and we may as well experience it as the artist intended.If you ask an astronomer, many will say that magnetars are among the scariest objects in the galaxy. “I didn’t hear anything scary in it,” she said, but “I totally understand that other people have a different perspective.” Scientists and sound engineers could certainly edit the clip to make it less creepy, mixing in some chimes or nice harp chords. She has worked on the Chandra mission for more than two decades, and being so intimately familiar with the data, she was unlikely to be spooked by it, even when it sounds like, you know, that. Arcand grew up singing in choirs, and for her, the Perseus audio is musical, like a dramatic tune from an emotional, sweeping Hans Zimmer track. When I asked Arcand what she thought about the sound freaking people out, she cracked up. Still, “this is as close as we know how to get,” she said. The spooky audio is a combination of the sound waves emanating from the central galaxy in different directions, not a single scream in time. At the same time, the cosmic wail wouldn’t sound exactly like this if you could hang out in the Perseus galaxy cluster with a helmet and superpowered hearing. It’s more objective, which makes the noise feel a bit more real. “The Perseus one is perhaps the most evocative because it is actually based on sound waves,” Arcand said. They are nothing like the primal scream of the Perseus cluster, which the Chandra team released in May this year. Most of the sonifications in Chandra’s library do too, even the clips that lack instrumental elements and feature only a jumble of notes. The melody of our galactic center sounds lovely, peaceful. The image features observations in multiple wavelengths, which scientists used to make a more beautiful song: xylophone for X-rays, violin for optical light, piano for infrared. Short notes represent stars, and a drawn-out hum indicates clouds of gas and dust. Stellar stuff at the top of the image corresponds to higher pitches the brightest bits play at top volume. To hear it, scientists assigned different sonic features to the cosmic material in a snapshot of the galaxy. Consider the glittering, star-filled center of our Milky Way galaxy. The result: a spooky, cosmic wail.Īrcand and her team at Chandra have previously made a variety of celestial images into music through a process known as sonification, but those projects were based on light, not sound. Arcand and her team extracted the sound data from Chandra’s observations and then, with some mathematical work and sound editing, brought them into the range of human hearing, a couple hundred quadrillion times higher than the original frequency. Arcand told me she was inspired by Wanda Díaz-Merced, a blind astrophysicist who developed a program to convert sunlight into sound so that she could hear a solar eclipse sweeping across the United States in 2017. She wanted the public, and particularly those who are blind or have reduced vision, to be able to experience the wonder of the Perseus cluster with senses besides sight. It wasn’t until recently that Kimberly Arcand, Chandra’s visualization scientist, decided to shift those impossibly low cosmic notes into the audible range. The resulting waves, astronomers concluded, were sound waves, with a frequency much too deep for any of us to hear. When the black hole sucks in cosmic material, it burps some out-explosive behavior that pushes around the gas nearby. The ripples, scientists determined, were produced by the supermassive black hole in the cluster’s central galaxy. In 2002, when a NASA space telescope named Chandra studied the Perseus cluster, it detected wavelike movements in the gas, propagating outward like ripples in water. Some parts of space are full of hot gas, including the medium between the distant, sparkly galaxies huddled together. And there is a perfectly horror-free explanation for it. ![]() Just nothing good less awe-ful, and more awful. The noise sounds like a ghostly wail, or the horror-movie music just before a jump scare, or, as several people have pointed out, the cries of countless souls trapped in eternal darkness. ![]()
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