Start 2023 By Listening to a Black Hole

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NASA has released a sonification that converts the chaotic environment surrounding a gargantuan black hole into sound. The black hole — which has a mass of up to 10 Suns — orbits 7,800 light-years from Earth, and has been spotted tearing chunks off a companion star.

For thousands of years, humanity has looked up at the night sky and sought to unravel the secrets of the cosmos. Sadly, the realities of space travel prevent us from setting out amongst the stars and exploring the heavens in person.

However, astronomers are able to reveal the secrets and beauty of the universe by observing the light cast off by the stars, galaxies, nebulae and sundry other celestial bodies that populate the cosmos.

This visual data can also be converted into sound, granting the public a whole new way to experience the universe using a different sense. During a sonification, a line passes across an image, and each object it strikes is converted into a musical note or sound.

Most recently, NASA scientists set to work sonifying the chaotic environment surrounding a black hole in the system V404 Cygni. It is impossible to actually observe a black hole as you would a star, as no light is able to escape its phenomenally powerful gravitational pull.

However, it is possible to capture the light cast out by the superheated material that is being drawn towards a black hole’s event horizon. The black hole at the heart of V404 Cygni was spotted by NASA’s Chandra and Swift orbital telescopes feeding on material drawn from a nearby companion star.

The material — which has settled to form a disk surrounding the singularity — pulses periodically, sending out waves of radiation that scatter as they strike the clouds of dust and gas orbiting the black hole. This is the tumultuous environment that was converted to sound in NASA's latest sonification.

Data from the Chandra telescope is displayed in red and given a higher-frequency sound, while observations from Swift can be seen in blue, and have a lower frequency. Clicks can also be heard throughout the sonification, denoting the presence of X-rays and shifts in luminocity.

Astronomers have also sonified the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy and breathtaking starfields taken by the Hubble Space Telescope to name a few.

To find these and more cosmic soundscapes head over to NASA's A Universe of Sound website, and for everything else science related stick with IGN.

Anthony is a freelance contributor covering science and video gaming news for IGN. He has over eight years experience of covering breaking developments in multiple scientific fields and absolutely no time for your shenanigans. Follow him on Twitter @BeardConGamer

Image credit: X-ray: Chandra: NASA/CXC/U.Wisc-Madison/S. Heinz et al.; Swift: NASA/Swift/Univ. of Leicester/A. Beardmore; Optical: DSS; Sonification: NASA/CXC/SAO/K.Arcand, SYSTEM Sounds (M. Russo, A. Santaguida

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