The sound waves were discovered in 2003, when, after 53 hours of observation, researchers with NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory “discovered that pressure waves sent out by the black hole caused ripples in the cluster's hot gas that could be translated into a note.”
NASA has released a haunting audio clip of sound waves rippling out of a supermassive black hole, located 250 million light-years away. The black hole is at the center of the Perseus cluster of galaxies, and the acoustic waves coming from it have been transposed up 57 and 58 octaves so they're audible to human hearing.
"According to NASA, a black hole sounds like billions of souls wailing in anguish from the depths of hell," one tweet read.
“There's all this hot gas surrounding the black hole, and the black hole is basically spitting out energy in some sort of periodic way––just like a speaker is moving in a periodic way–to give you some frequency,” says Jonathan Blazek, Northeastern assistant professor of physics.
While some have hypothesised that 'death by black hole' would involve a painful roasting, generally, physicists agree that if you get too close to the event horizon, your body would be 'spagettified' as the gravitational tidal forces stretched you apart.
The fate of anyone falling into a black hole would be a painful “spaghettification,” an idea popularized by Stephen Hawking in his book “A Brief History of Time.” In spaghettification, the intense gravity of the black hole would pull you apart, separating your bones, muscles, sinews and even molecules.
If you leapt heroically into a stellar-mass black hole, your body would be subjected to a process called 'spaghettification' (no, really, it is). The black hole's gravity force would compress you from top to toe, while stretching you at the same time… thus, spaghetti.
This energy takes the form of a slow-but-steady stream of radiation and particles that came to be known as Hawking radiation. With every bit of energy that escapes, the black hole loses mass and thereby shrinks, eventually popping out of existence altogether.
If black holes evaporate under Hawking radiation, a solar mass black hole will evaporate over 1064 years which is vastly longer than the age of the universe. A supermassive black hole with a mass of 1011 (100 billion) M ☉ will evaporate in around 2×10100 years.
The loudest sound in the universe definitely comes from black hole mergers. In this case the “sound” comes out in gravitational waves and not ordinary sound waves.
No, there isn't sound in space.
This is because sound travels through the vibration of particles, and space is a vacuum. On Earth, sound mainly travels to your ears by way of vibrating air molecules, but in near-empty regions of space there are no (or very, very few) particles to vibrate – so no sound.
Isn't that what people call black holes? It is, in fact, and some physicists say they could be one and the same: The singularity in every black hole might give birth to a baby universe. There's no reason to think our universe is any different.
That's a note played at a frequency a million, billion times lower than anything the human ear can detect. And the output is a whopping ten-to-the-power-of-thirty-seven watts, or about ten billion times the energy of our Sun.
In its sonifications of the black hole in the M87 galaxy, which was first imaged in 2019, NASA created audio using X-ray, optical light and radio wave data from ground and space telescopes.
Tamil Nadu's ADGP, Sandeep Mittal, re-tweeted NASA's viral audio clip of black hole's sound and wrote in Hindi," This sound has been named Om by our sages. The advent of the universe and its end -- everything is Om. This sound has the capacity to bring about the end of the world.
Eventually, in theory, black holes will evaporate through Hawking radiation. But it would take much longer than the entire age of the universe for most black holes we know about to significantly evaporate.
It is possible for two black holes to collide. Once they come so close that they cannot escape each other's gravity, they will merge to become one bigger black hole.
Black holes are dark, dense regions in space where the pull of gravity is so strong that nothing can escape. Not even light can get out of these regions. That is why we cannot see black holes—they are invisible to our eyes. Because nothing can get out of black holes, physicists struggle understanding these objects.
Wormholes are shortcuts in spacetime, popular with science fiction authors and movie directors. They've never been seen, but according to Einstein's general theory of relativity, they might exist.
Located just under 1,600 light-years away, the discovery suggests there might be a sizable population of dormant black holes in binary systems. The black hole Gaia BH1, seen in this artist's concept near its Sun-like companion star, is the closest black hole to Earth discovered so far.
The person would experience spaghettification, and most likely not survive being stretched into a long, thin noodlelike shape.
Black holes are regions of space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape them, not even light. Even before you reach the event horizon – the point of no return – you would be “spaghettified” by the black hole's tidal forces. Astronomers do not actually know what goes on inside black holes.
Theorists say it's technically possible, but it would be a weird place to live. Supermassive black holes have a reputation for consuming everything in their path, from gas clouds to entire solar systems.
Death by black hole
Of course, no matter what type of black hole you plunge into, you're ultimately going to get torn apart by its extreme gravity and die a horrible death. No material that falls inside a black hole could survive intact.