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Listen To The First Ever Audio Recording Of The Inside Of A Black Hole

Vaaswat Sarkar

An enourmous celestial entity that devours everything in its path, black holes are some of the strangest and most fascinating objects floating around in space. They are very highly dense and have such a strong gravitational force that not even light can escape their grasp, which is why we can’t see them. Scientists believe they are formed when the corpse of a massive star collapses in on itself, becoming so dense that it warps the fabric of space and time. Even with such advancements in the realm of space technology, these gigantic cosmological phenomena remain still shrouded in mystery.

Any matter that crosses paths with a black hole spirals forlornly into an unknown fate or a point of no return, as scientists call it. The question of what lies beyond a black hole has forever eluded us. The milky Way may contain over 100 million black holes but detecting these monstrous beings is a tricky affair. According to a statement from NASA, the biggest known black hole in our Milky Way is Sagittarius A*. The mammoth structure is about 4 million times the mass of the sun and lies approximately 26,000 light-years away from Earth.

Albert Einstein was the first scientist to predict the existence of black holes in 1916, with his general theory of relativity. The term 'black hole' was, however, coined many years later in 1967 by American astronomer John Wheeler. Till then the world believed black holes to be only theoretical objects.

Have you ever wondered what these giants might sound like? I know, I have. Thanks to NASA’s team of researchers, we can all hear what a black hole sounds like. In the vacuum of space, it is almost impossible to hear anything but NASA recently revealed that black holes emit noises that sound like ghostly alien moans and wails. NASA's Twitter account for its exoplanet programs shared an audio clip of eerie sounds that come from waves of pressure, which ripple from a black hole through a cluster of galaxies.

Listen to the unearthly sounds below, captured from a black-hole pressure rippling through the Perseus galaxy cluster.

However, the actual sound is beyond the human hearing range at 57 octaves below middle C. The Chandra X-ray Observatory captured data from the ripples in the Perseus cluster, visible in X-ray, which led to inaudible sounds. NASA then scaled the sounds up from their actual pitch to a decibel accessible to the human ear. What you just heard is 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency.

Twitter exploded with a variety of reactions upon hearing this audio clip. Someone said, “This is cool — and really, really spooky", while another account tweeted that it sounds like “a billion souls being tortured”. Canadian actor Elizabeth Bowen compared it to "that scene in the movie when someone accidentally stumbles upon some sort of satanic cult in the middle of the woods."

Let us know what was the first thought that popped into your head when you heard the audio clip.

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