NASA turns the black hole’s “light echo” into sound

The mystery of the black hole still puzzles us despite intense space exploration. In a new video, NASA attempts to explain the wonders of this ghostly phenomenon. On Friday, the US space agency turned the black hole’s “light echo” into sound.

The space agency took to Instagram to share the video. “Black holes are notorious for not letting light (such as radio, visible light and X-rays) escape from them. However, the surrounding material may generate strong blasts of electromagnetic radiation. As it moves outward, these light sculptures can bounce. clouds of gas and dust in space, like a ray of light from a car’s headlights would scatter from fog,” they wrote in the caption.

In the video, the red circular cross is surrounded by a starry background. The blue band highlights the interior and bottom of the black hole system. During the sonication process, the pointer moves outward from the center of the image in a circle. As it passes through the light echoes detected on the X-rays (shown as concentric rings in blue by Chandra and red by Swift in the image), the sound is similar to a ticking sound and changes in amplitude to indicate the detection of x-rays and differences in brightness,” the statement further explains.

Watch the video here:

According to NASA, the black hole in the video is about 7,800 light-years from Earth. The black hole is between five and 10 times the mass of the Sun, and attracts material from a companion star orbiting it, which is “directed into a disk surrounding the stellar-mass black hole,” according to the researchers. . V404 Cygni is a system containing a black hole. The new sonication turns the “light echo” of the black hole V404 Cygni into sound.

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“NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory imaged the X-ray light echo around V404 Cygni,” the space agency said. Astronomers can calculate when this explosion occurred because they know how fast light travels and have determined the exact distance to this system. This data, along with other information, helps astronomers learn more about dust clouds, such as their composition and distance.

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