But where it does differ, is that usually NASA sonifies data in order to make it sound like something closer to traditional music (see, e.g. this one). By contrast, the black hole sound has been sonified based on the 'actual sound waves discovered in data' from Chandra. The music-like sonifications sound a bit silly.
A new sonification turns X-ray “light echoes” from a black hole into sound. Rings of X-rays seen by NASA's Chandra and Swift observatories show the echoes. Material around a black hole can generate bursts of X-rays. The X-rays reflect off clouds of gas and dust like beams from headlights can in fog.
As NASA explained it back then, "Astronomers 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 — one that humans cannot hear some 57 octaves below middle C." To us, it just sounds like a beginning of a very sinister dubstep track.
Astronomers discovered the pressure waves sent out by the black hole were causing ripples in the hot gas. Those vibrations could be translated into a musical note, but the note is far too low for humans to hear, some 57 octaves below middle C.
No, there isn't sound in space.
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.
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.
The nearest known black hole is Gaia BH1, which was discovered in September 2022 by a team led by Kareem El-Badry. Gaia BH1 is 1,560 light-years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus.
Black holes have two parts. There is the event horizon, which you can think of as the surface, though it's simply the point where the gravity gets too strong for anything to escape. And then, at the center, is the singularity. That's the word we use to describe a point that is infinitely small and infinitely dense.
Near a black hole, the slowing of time is extreme. From the viewpoint of an observer outside the black hole, time stops. For example, an object falling into the hole would appear frozen in time at the edge of the hole. Inside a black hole is where the real mystery lies.
By their calculations, quantum mechanics could feasibly turn the event horizon into a giant wall of fire and anything coming into contact would burn in an instant. In that sense, black holes lead nowhere because nothing could ever get inside.
For most space objects, we use light-years to describe their distance. A light-year is the distance light travels in one Earth year. One light-year is about 6 trillion miles (9 trillion km). That is a 6 with 12 zeros behind it!
Since the Milky Way contains over 100 billion stats, our home galaxy must harbor some 100 million black holes. Though detecting black holes is a difficult task and estimates from NASA suggest there could be as many as 10 million to a billion stellar black holes in the Milky Way.
The possibility that a black hole could actually impact Earth may seem straight out of science fiction, but the reality is that microscopic primordial black holes could actually hit Earth. If one did, it wouldn't just impact like an asteroid, it'd pass straight through the entire Earth and exit the other side.
Black holes, the gigantic remains of collapsed stars that are massive inescapable singularities of gravity, will eventually evaporate and fade into nothingness, something that Stephen Hawking predicted. But the same fate also awaits literally everything else, a recent study suggests.
The most powerful supernova yet recorded (ASSASN-15lh) was 22 trillion times more explosive than a black hole will be in its final moments. It doesn't matter how small or how massive a black hole is, their closing fireworks are exactly the same. The only difference is how long it will take a black hole to explode.
While researchers have never found a wormhole in our universe, scientists often see wormholes described in the solutions to important physics equations. Most prominently, the solutions to the equations behind Einstein's theory of space-time and general relativity include wormholes.
Even a small black hole is extraordinarily dense and massive. If Earth was (hypothetically) crushed into a black hole, it would be under an inch across. Yet there are black holes in the universe bigger than our solar system, and bigger than the giant Andromeda galaxy.
An expert in the field — an astrophysicist and black hole researcher — even told Mashable that humans are “unbelievably safe” from these black holes. We aren't in any danger, luckily, but black holes could still affect us in a different, perhaps unexpected, way.
You might hear that certain black holes "face Earth" and shoot jets of energy our way, as scientists found earlier this year in a galaxy over 650 million light-years away. This is true. There are countless black holes out there, and some are invariably positioned toward us.
A light-year is the distance a beam of light travels in a single Earth year, which equates to approximately 6 trillion miles (9.7 trillion kilometers).
Based on our current understanding of physics and the limits of the natural world, the answer, sadly, is no. According to Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity, summarized by the famous equation E=mc2, the speed of light (c) is something like a cosmic speed limit that cannot be surpassed.
whence the travel time for 40 light years will be 40×30000016.8≈700000years.
Time travel to the past is theoretically possible in certain general relativity spacetime geometries that permit traveling faster than the speed of light, such as cosmic strings, traversable wormholes, and Alcubierre drives.
There is no way a black hole would eat an entire galaxy. The gravitational reach of supermassive black holes contained in the middle of galaxies is large, but not nearly large enough for eating the whole galaxy.