NASA Captures 'Actual Sound' In Space (vice.com) 57
Space can be downright noisy in the right conditions, such as the hot gas surrounding the immense black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster, according to NASA. Motherboard reports: The agency recently tweeted an eerie audio clip that represents actual sound waves rippling through the gas and plasma in this cluster, which is 250 million light years from Earth. "The misconception that there is no sound in space originates because most space is a ~vacuum, providing no way for sound waves to travel," the agency tweeted. "A galaxy cluster has so much gas that we've picked up actual sound. Here it's amplified, and mixed with other data, to hear a black hole!"
Though the acoustic signals generated by the black hole were first identified in 2003 in data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, they have never been brought into the hearing range of the human ear -- until now. "In some ways, this sonification is unlike any other done before... because it revisits the actual sound waves discovered in data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory," NASA said in a statement. "In this new sonification of Perseus, the sound waves astronomers previously identified were extracted and made audible for the first time." "As it turns out, the sound waves in their natural environment are a whopping 57 octaves below the note middle C, making this black hole a real cosmic baritone," adds Motherboard. "To make these tremors audible to humans, scientists raised their frequencies quadrillions of times (one quadrillion is a million billions, for perspective)."
Though the acoustic signals generated by the black hole were first identified in 2003 in data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, they have never been brought into the hearing range of the human ear -- until now. "In some ways, this sonification is unlike any other done before... because it revisits the actual sound waves discovered in data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory," NASA said in a statement. "In this new sonification of Perseus, the sound waves astronomers previously identified were extracted and made audible for the first time." "As it turns out, the sound waves in their natural environment are a whopping 57 octaves below the note middle C, making this black hole a real cosmic baritone," adds Motherboard. "To make these tremors audible to humans, scientists raised their frequencies quadrillions of times (one quadrillion is a million billions, for perspective)."
57 ocataves? (Score:1)
57 octaves above 440 Hz is ... 6.34*10e19 Hz.
Re:57 ocataves? (Score:4, Informative)
You got it backwards.
Re: 57 ocataves? (Score:5, Informative)
And 440hz is "concert A".
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Except TFS says "below".
Raised a quadrillon time: Why not octave (Score:3)
Music is a field where using a log scale is absolutely normal.
"Octaves" are doubling of frequencies. So:
scientists raised their frequencies quadrillions of times (one quadrillion is a million billions, for perspective).
ex.: 1 quadrillon would mean that they raised it by: ln(1e15)/ln(2) =~ 49.82
The article is much better (yes, I looked at it, I will be handing back my /. card):
The signals were then resynthesized into the range of human hearing by scaling them upward by 57 and 58 octaves above their true pitch. Another way to put this is that they are being heard 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency.
Sound was shifted back to middle range, and the "octave" logarithmic notation makes much more sense that the bazillon huge numbers.
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Sound was shifted back to middle range, and the "octave" logarithmic notation makes much more sense that the bazillon huge numbers.
Makes...much more sense?
"To make these tremors audible to humans, scientists raised their frequencies quadrillions of times..."
The definition of sound is now apparently modifying the living shit out of a non-audible signal in order to create "sound" for us to hear.
Gotta love this new era of re-defining everything based on whatever "they" decide makes sense at the time.
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I suppose you are against slow motion capture too.
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Sound is simply an example of propagation of a wave through a medium. No definition I'm aware demands that that medium be an atmosphere. We stretch the definition to describe pressure waves transmitted through water. So why wouldn't you describe such a phenomenon as sound when it's pressure waves propagating through a medium of interstellar gas?
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Sound is a pressure wave travelling in a medium.
You're the one doing the re-defining. It's a pretty common human activity, particularly on the Internet.
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Sound is a pressure wave travelling in a medium.
You're the one doing the re-defining. It's a pretty common human activity, particularly on the Internet.
If humans are the species defining "sound" and the ones utilizing that definition, then it tends to make sense exactly what sound is to us, the actual audience reading a paper about "actual" space sounds.
Why do you think they felt the need to "raised their frequencies quadrillions of times" in order to write a paper on space sounds?
My human point stands. "Sound" far outside of human capability, means basically nothing to the human not hearing/feeling it.
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My human point stands.
It is called the I Human Complex. The belief that you have a right to be first, because you misinterpret the Law of Identity to mean you're the center of the universe. Here, you want to be so central that what matters to you becomes objective. But no, it just means you're an idiot with a very low level of self-awareness.
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...Here, you want to be so central that what matters..
Yup. Agreed. We're two humans here discussing the species-specific definition of "sound", along with the collected datapoints gathered by said species, exclusively for said species. I really don't care what canines have to bark on the matter, honestly. Guess I'm one of the self-aware ones who more identifies with the logic of irrelevance.
Regarding this particular datapoint, we collected data from millions of light years away to run them through our human-created bug-riddled computing devices to interpr
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Baritone? (Score:4, Funny)
Actually, more like basso profundissimo
Ok stupid question (Score:2)
"... "To make these tremors audible to humans, scientists raised their frequencies quadrillions of times (one quadrillion is a million billions, for perspective)."..."
They already said it was 57 octaves below middle c, ie 57 octaves below 256 Hz.
Isn't frequency PITCH not volume?
If they raised the frequency that much, wouldn't that raise it vastly into the ultra sound spectrum and this likewise impossible to hear?
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However the human sense of hearing is rather limited in the range of wavelength that it naturally can pick up and has a lower limit of around 20Hz.
Those 57 octaves below 256 Hz would be in the range of 10^-18Hz (1/quintillion) to 10^-15Hz (1/quadrillion), which is well beyond the hearing threshold of possibly all known life.
So that's what they did, they changed the pitch to be within the range of human hearing.
It's the analogue to false color images, l
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I see 57 octaves below middle C and I'm already picturing metal guitarists trying to calculate how thick the string needs to be to tune that low.
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Based on normal tuning, you'd need a 120-string guitar to play the full range to audible. That's not horrible.
Re: Ok stupid question (Score:2)
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Is that all?
Time to upgrade the eight and nine stringers.
Re: Ok stupid question (Score:2)
That's all ? I regularly tune my 189 strings French double harpsichord. I don't think it's got that kind of range, though.
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The frequency of a string is a sqrt(1/d) relationship, so pretty thick. On the other hand, you'd run into some issues with the density increasing (sqrt(p) relationship) that would work against you. Probably better to make it longer instead.
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I find it absolutely hilarious how on-point that comment is. On the extended range guitar forums, it's a constant fight between those that will tune to drop-q (not a real note) on 25.5" scale, and those that think even standard tuning needs 29" or more to not fall into "inharmonicity." You basically in-joked my in-joke without even knowing the in-joke.
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Lol. I expect your string collapsing into a black hole would indeed cause some pretty bad "inharmonicity."
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If the frequency is x amount below a reference and you raise that frequency x amount than it doesn't go way above the reference frequency it goes to the reference frequency.
Although the article is talking frequency and not volume, the same would hold true i you were talking volume instead of frequency.
Makes no sense: humanity too young. (Score:4, Interesting)
OK, so if they raised the sound 57 octaves, a multiplier of 144 quadrillion, and they got a sound out of that which humans can hear, so at least 20Hz, that means the period of the original sound would have been at least (1/20 Ã-- 144 quadrillion) = 7 quadrillion seconds, which is about 230 million years for just a single wavelength.
I doubt we've been measuring it for that long.
Re:Makes no sense: humanity too young. (Score:5, Informative)
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Ah, got it (also reading the article helps). We're looking at a cross-section of the pressure waves rather than waiting for them to pass us by.
That makes it clear. (Score:2)
This was never meant for mortal ears!
Beware! If you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you!
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Density fluctuations are not sound. Sound is the transmission of vibrational energy through a medium, its not the large scale movement of the medium itself.
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Sound is not just random particle collisions, it has a vibrational pattern.
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Physics disagrees with you [wikibooks.org]. Sound waves and small fluctuations in pressure - and thus density - do not require large scale movement of the fluid itself.
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In Stereo? I call bullshit. (Score:2)
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This is just a sonification (as opposed to visualisation), so it's derived from data, which is in-turn derived from observation, which is about as sciencey as you can get.
The sweep of the bar in the video gives a clue to what's going on; they've panned the audio for effect; presumably to better illustrate which section of the galaxy cluster they're "sonicising" at the time.
It's just to illustrate their point that there's sufficient gas density in the galaxy cluster for vibrations (albeit very, very, very sl
There is no sound in space (Score:2)
Sure there are gas molecules drifting around a central gravitational point but unlike in a normal gas the density is so low most of the molecules and atoms never encounter each other so there is no possibility of sound. I suspect what they refer to as sound is the "gas" simply vibrating under other forces which can be translated into a sound but if you stuck a microphone there it would pick up nothing.
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There's literally everything in space, Morty!
-Rick Sanchez
In space... (Score:2)
In space...nobody can hear you scream? Forget the movie maybe Apollo 18, Event Horizon... guess not.
JoshK.
Sonification dumbs down the data... (Score:2)
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To truly experience the sound a massive subwoofer and amplifier for the frequency should be constructed. A subwoofer unlike what we have ever seen.
I can imagine what that would feel like. You won't hear the sound, but you would feel it.
Let's hope it's not the brown note.
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"I can imagine what that would feel like"
Given the wavelength in air would be around 350 lightyears lhat seems unlikely.
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I would hazard to guess that it would feel like standing next to a black hole.
And reverb? (Score:2)
Something doesn't add up. (Score:2)
Middle C is about 264Hz. So 57 octaves below that is about 1.84e-15 Hz or about one cycle every 23 million years.
So how TF could NASA collect enough cycles to make the sound? They'd have to collect billions of years worth of data for a one second clip.
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Oops, typo. It's one cyle about every 17.2 million years, not 23 million. But still.
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OK, got it. It's not a real sound; the article did explain how it works.
Ether and the Theory of Relativity by A Einstein (Score:2)
How does it come about that alongside of the idea of ponderable matter, which is derived by abstraction from everyday life, the physicists set the idea of the existence of another kind of matter, the ether? The explanation is probably to be sought in those phenomena which have given rise to the theory of action at a distance, and in the properties of light which have led to the undulatory theory. Let us devote a little while to the consideration of these two subjects.
Outside of physics we know nothing of ac
continuing (slashdot said it was too long) (Score:2)
Since according to our present conceptions the elementary particles of matter are also, in their essence, nothing else than condensations of the electromagnetic field, our present view of the universe presents two realities which are completely separated from each other conceptually, although connected causally, namely, gravitational ether and electromagnetic field, or - as they might also be called - space and matter.
Of course it would be a great advance if we could succeed in comprehending the gravitation
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Thanks for this writeup. Great history and interesting points. I've printed out your comments for further study. Perhaps you should write a book!
One thing though. My understanding is that ether theory predates Newton. I've seen arguments that some of the Veda's describe the ether, but ignoring that Descartes clearly described an ether. [1]
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calling Simon & Garfunkel (Score:2)
"Mr. Simon and Mr. Garfunkel, please report to the front desk. Your royalty checks for 'The Sound of Silence' are ready."
hawk
Sound depends on technique (Score:2)
'Actual Sound' ? (Score:2)
There is a reason for why they put 'actual sound' in quotes. It's because it is not, actually, the actual sound in space.
NASA and a lot of US higher education press releases are really taking a nose dive when it comes to actually representing the science they're doing. It makes me sick that these are institutions mostly populated by smart people and that these people don't object to the kinds of press releases being put out.