Tour: NASA Telescopes Tune Into a Black Hole Prelude, Fugue

Three new pieces of cosmic sound are being released to celebrate black holes, the densest and darkest members of our universe. These scientific productions are sonifications — or translations — of data collected by NASA telescopes in space including the Chandra X-ray Observatory, James Webb Space Telescope, Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, or IXPE, and others.

Black holes are neither static nor monolithic. They form and they evolve, and are found in a range of sizes and environments. This new trio of sonifications represent different aspects of black holes.

The first object is a prelude to the potential birth of a black hole. WR124 is an extremely bright, short-lived massive star known as a Wolf-Rayet at a distance of about 28,000 light-years from Earth. These stars fling their outer layers out into space, creating spectacular arrangements seen in an image in infrared light from the Webb telescope. At the center of WR124 is a hot core of the star that may explode as a supernova and potentially leave behind a black hole in its wake.

SS 433 is a binary, or double, system about 18,000 light-years away that sings out in X-rays. The two members of SS 433 include a star like our Sun in orbit around a much heavier partner, either a neutron star or a black hole. This orbital dance causes undulations in X-rays that Chandra, IXPE and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton telescopes are tuned into. These X-ray notes have been combined with radio and infrared data to provide a backdrop for this celestial waltz.

The third and final movement of the black hole-themed release crescendos with a distant galaxy known as Centaurus A, about 12 million light-years away from Earth. At the center of Centaurus A is an enormous black hole that is sending a booming jet across the entire length of the galaxy. X-rays from both Chandra and IXPE have been combined with visible light data from the European Southern Observatory’s MPG telescope.

Sonifications give us a different way to explore data that we collect from space using Chandra and other telescopes. Pull up a chair and lend an ear to what the universe can sound like.