Listen to the sonification of a black hole

Originally published at: Listen to the sonification of a black hole | Boing Boing

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I quite like adding random announcements from Scotrail over the top of it.

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It’s extremely unclear what’s going on here, but my guess is that they translated the spatial frequencies along the sweeping radius line into corresponding sound waves, brought up a couple dozen octaves of course.

Now why this was done by NASA Exoplanets I have no idea.

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The other day, I found out that due to the sun’s expansion, life on earth only has another 600 million years, and I’m having an existential crisis. I thought we had at least another billion years, but 600 million is geological time, not astronomical time.

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Wow, it’s real-life Music from the Hearts of Space!

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Soooo, for human interstellar colonization to work, we’d have to find a young G-star with (forming) planets that would mature into having a habitual Earth-like planet about the time colonists arrive. Wow, talk about a crap shoot.

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This makes me happy :hugs:

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That was terrifying. I’m not sure I’ll be able to sleep knowing this is lurking out in space…

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Ohhhhhhh, I wouldn’t worry about that.

We’re due for some extinction level super-volcanic activity and getting zapped by one or more massive asteroids long before 600M years. :wink:

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And we only have about 600 million years left!

Very true, but somehow the fact that our sun is nearing the end of its life makes me sad.

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Reboing

And

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The Earth’s future, the sun’s future, the universe’s future. It’s all grim.

But yeah. This is a gut punch. To put it in perspective, this was earth 600 million years ago.

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I don’t understand what’s going on with this sound.

Obviously, it’s not a recording. The animation implies that the “music’s” time is actually a function of the angle around the black hole, which makes me think they mapped distance to wavelength and density to intensity. That’s not what description says though. Maybe the PR person explained it poorly / too simplistically?

10/10 for the Great Krell Machine / Forbidden Planet reference!

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