While astronomers are familiar with visual forms, the project has provided data that will expand the ways in which researchers can learn about black holes. The sonification project has provided a new way for astronomers to interact with data in different forms. It’s more of the effect the black hole has on its surroundings,” said Frank van den Bosch, Yale professor of astronomy and physics, whose research focuses on cosmology and galaxy formation. “It’s not so much directly the black hole. “The general research used for data like this is to understand the role supermassive black holes play in regulating the star formation in the universe,” said Michael Tremmel, post-doctoral associate of astronomy.įor researchers, the importance of this development stems from the tangible representation of the way black holes, specifically their sound waves, interact with the surrounding space. Star formation relies heavily on heated gasses, so the sonification project and investigation of sound waves could help researchers better understand the formation of stars. Energy propagating from the black hole interacts with gasses in the form of sound waves, and this interaction heats gasses up. The waves are indicators of how energy from the black hole is interacting with the surrounding gasses. These sound waves are not audible to the human ear without modification, but now that NASA transposed the waves they can be listened to, interpreted and analyzed. The black hole at the center of the Perseus Galaxy Cluster has been investigated ever since researchers at NASA realized that it emitted pressure waves that would interact with gasses around it and produce sound waves. And this gas reverberates, so you can see these sound waves, and that’s the sonification project.” “Right around the vicinity of the black hole, there is a medium, there’s a lot of gas sitting around. “It provides sort of a unique way to study the environments of black holes,” said astronomy professor and department chair Priyamvada Natarajan. Yale astronomers underscored the significance of this development. While the audio is fascinating in itself, it also provides another dimension of data in investigating black holes, star formation and galaxies for researchers. The process involves sound waves being extracted radially, outwards from the center of the black hole, and then transposed up by 57 to 58 octaves to make them audible to the human ear. However, the sonification - the conversion of astronomical data into sound - is a recent development by researchers at NASA. NASA released a groundbreaking audio clip of the soundwaves emitted by the black hole in the Perseus Galaxy Cluster, located 250 million light years away from Earth.Īstronomers have been aware of the sound waves emitted by the black hole at the center of the Perseus Galaxy Cluster for nearly 20 years, since they were first captured by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory in 2003.
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