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. Just nothing good; less awe-ful, and more awful. Does space really sound this scary?
The answer is, sort of. And there is a perfectly horror-free explanation for it. Some parts of space are full of hot gas, including the medium between the distant, sparkly galaxies huddled together. 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. The ripples, scientists determined, were produced by the supermassive black hole in the cluster’s central galaxy. When the black hole sucks in cosmic material, it burps some out—explosive behavior that pushes around the gas nearby. The resulting waves, astronomers concluded, were sound waves, with a frequency much too deep for any of us to hear.
It wasn’t until recently that Kimberly Arcand, Chandra’s visualization scientist, decided to shift those impossibly low cosmic notes into the audible range. 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. 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. Arcand extracted the sound data from Chandra’s observations and then, with some mathematical work and sound editing, brought them into the range of human hearing, a couple hundred quadrillion times higher than the original frequency. The result: a spooky, cosmic wail.
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