Black holes are some of the most extreme objects in the cosmos. These massive, extraordinarily dense objects have such strong gravity that they suck in anything which comes to close to them — even light. But that doesn’t mean that black holes are featureless. Although the black holes themselves are invisible, the clouds of dust and gas around them can get extremely hot and glow brightly, enabling telescopes to ‘see’ the black hole in detail.
It’s not just images that allow us to experience black holes though. NASA has produced a set of sonifications of black holes, turning these images into sounds as a different way to convey data collected by telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope, Chandra X-ray Observatory, and Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE).
The three sonifications are shared below, showing three different stages in the life of a black hole.
First up is WR 124, a type of star called a Wolf-Rayet which is a potential precursor to a black hole. As these old, massive stars come to the end of their lives, they start throwing off layers of gas into space, creating elaborate clouds around them. Eventually, when it has thrown off enough of its material, this star may collapse and become a new black hole.
In the sonification, the sounds start at the center where the core is, and moving out the X-day data is represented by harp sounds while data from James Webb is represented by bells. The other infrared data, from three different telescopes, is represented by strings.
The second sonification is of SS 433, a binary system consisting of a star like our sun and a much heavier partner which is thought to be either a black hole or a neutron star. The two objects orbit each other, creating changes in X-rays which are detectable by telescopes on Earth. Combining the X-ray data with infrared and radio, this sonification moves from right to left across the image. Points of light that are nearer the top of the image are represented by higher notes, while radio, infrared, and X-ray light is represented by low, medium, and high pitches. The stars in the background can be heard as water drop noises.
Finally, Centaurus A is a nearby and well-known galaxy, which is famous for being extremely bright and giving off strong radio waves. At its heart, this galaxy hosts an enormous supermassive black hole which is the star of this sonification. The black hole gives out a jet which is the source of the radio waves, and the sonification traces its effect in radar style, moving clockwise and representing X-ray data from Chandra as wind chimes, with X-ray data from IXPE in a continuous wind sound.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.