Micheal, that is by far the best thing I've learned in a long time! What a fascinating proposition!
Of course, these phenomena can't be in isolation, perhaps a deeper investigation of this can lead to mapping out the different frequencies that are available at different points in space, to eventually provide a kind of musical map of the universe! There's so many interesting angles from this, is this kind of thing not the essence of techno? Can't explain why, just feels like it. The music of the spheres.... Andrew PS. RAW, I don't recall black holes being anything to do with 'black material', fwiw you could be referring to 'dark matter', but that's a different phenomena to this, albeit related. > http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/09/10/blackhole.music.reut/index.html > > Black hole hums deepest note ever detected > > Wednesday, September 10, 2003 Posted: 1:51 PM EDT (1751 GMT) > > WASHINGTON, Sept 9 (Reuters) -- Big black holes sing bass. One particularly > monstrous black hole has probably been humming B flat for billions of > years, but at a pitch no human could hear, let alone sing, astronomers said > this week. > > "The intensity of the sound is comparable to human speech," said Andrew > Fabian of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge, England. But the pitch > of the sound is about 57 octaves below middle C, roughly the middle of a > standard piano keyboard. > > This is far, far deeper than humans can hear, the researchers said, and > they believe it is the deepest note ever detected in the universe. > > The sound waves are emanating from the Perseus Cluster, a giant clump of > galaxies some 250 million light-years from Earth. A light-year is about 6 > trillion miles (10 trillion km), the distance light travels in a year. > > Fabian and his colleagues used NASA's orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory to > investigate X-rays coming from the cluster's heart. > > Researchers presumed that a supermassive black hole, with perhaps 2.5 > billion times the mass of our sun, lay there, and the activity around the > center bolstered this assumption. > > Black holes are powerful matter-sucking drains in space, and astronomers > believe most galaxies, including our own Milky Way, may contain black holes > at their centers. > > Black holes have not been directly observed, because their gravitational > pull is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape it. > > Making waves > > So researchers have concentrated on what happens around the edges of black > holes, just before matter is pulled in. > > When scientists trained the Chandra observatory on the center of Perseus > last year, they saw concentric ripples in the cosmic gas that fills the > space between the galaxies in the cluster. > > "We're dealing with enormous scales here," Fabian said in a telephone > interview. "The size of these ripples is 30,000 light-years." > > Fabian said the ripples were caused by the rhythmic squeezing and heating > of the cosmic gas by the intense gravitational pressure of the jumble of > galaxies packed together in the cluster. > > As the black hole pulls material in, he said, it also creates jets of > material shooting out above and below it, and it is these powerful jets > that create the pressure that creates the sound waves. > > To scientists, he said, pressure ripples equate to sound waves. By > calculating how far apart the ripples were, and how fast sound might travel > there, the team of researchers determined the musical note of the sound. > > Fabian said the notion of singing black holes might well be extrapolated to > other galaxies, but not necessarily to the Milky Way. > > Chandra has looked at X-ray emissions from the Milky Way's center, and > astronomers believe there is a black hole there, but because it is a young, > rambunctious galaxy with lots of activity at its heart, this may interfere > with any note our black hole might sing, Fabian said. > >
