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Supermassive blackhole chords1/3/2024 Arcand told me she was inspired by Wanda Díaz-Merced, a blind astrophysicist who developed a program to convert sunlight into sound so that she could hear a solar eclipse sweeping across the United States in 2017. She wanted the public, and particularly those who are blind or have reduced vision, to be able to experience the wonder of the Perseus cluster with senses besides sight. It wasn’t until recently that Kimberly Arcand, Chandra’s visualization scientist, decided to shift those impossibly low cosmic notes into the audible range. The resulting waves, astronomers concluded, were sound waves, with a frequency much too deep for any of us to hear. When the black hole sucks in cosmic material, it burps some out-explosive behavior that pushes around the gas nearby. The ripples, scientists determined, were produced by the supermassive black hole in the cluster’s central galaxy. In 2002, when a NASA space telescope named Chandra studied the Perseus cluster, it detected wavelike movements in the gas, propagating outward like ripples in water. Some parts of space are full of hot gas, including the medium between the distant, sparkly galaxies huddled together. And there is a perfectly horror-free explanation for it. Just nothing good less awe-ful, and more awful. The noise sounds like a ghostly wail, or the horror-movie music just before a jump scare, or, as several people have pointed out, the cries of countless souls trapped in eternal darkness.
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