Posted on 08/14/2009 9:31:19 AM PDT by HIDEK6
Astronomers have detected the deepest note ever generated in the cosmos, a B-flat flying through space like a ripple on an invisible pond. No human will actually hear the note, because it is 57 octaves below the keys in the middle of a piano.
The detection was made with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and announced at a press conference today.
The note strikes an important chord with astronomers, who say it may help them understand how the universe's largest structures, called galaxy clusters, evolve. The sound waves appear to be heating gas in the Perseus galaxy cluster, some 250 million light-years away, potentially solving a longstanding mystery about why the gas surrounding this cluster and others does not chill out as existing theory predicts.
The gas is apparently dancing excitedly to the eons-long drone of a deep B-flat.
Black hole music
Astronomers were not surprised to find the supermassive black hole making a strong sub-bass sound. Though these greatest known matter sinks are by nature dark and invisible, they create bright and chaotic environments in which many forms of radiation -- from radio waves to visible light to X-rays -- have been recorded. These electromagnetic waves all travel at the speed of light.
Sound waves are similar, but they travel far more slowly and are more physical in nature. Sound you hear, for example, can be produced by the visible compression and expansion of a stereo speaker. The waves physically compress the stuff through which they move, be it air, water, or hot interstellar gas.
Other studies have shown that the riotous activity around black holes -- where gas is accelerated to nearly light-speed -- produces many notes that are, all together, much like music. Collectively, the cosmos produce, scientists believe, a cacophonic symphony of inaudible tunes.
Musical production appears to be ubiquitous in Nature. Scientists often call it flicker noise, and it has also been detected in the X-ray outputs of magnetic fields within our solar system. Even Earth hums its own tune. Musical analogies are found in everything from seascapes to brainwaves.
Way out of range
The 53 hours of Chandra observations revealed a note that is more than a million billion times deeper than what you can hear.
"We have observed the prodigious amounts of light and heat created by black holes," said Andrew Fabian of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, England, and leader of the study. "Now we have detected the sound."
"The Perseus sound waves are much more than just an interesting form of black hole acoustics," said Fabian's colleague Steve Allen. "These sound waves may be the key in figuring out how galaxy clusters grow."
Scientists had previously observed large amounts of hot gas infusing clusters. Given what's known, the gas should cool over time, however. Cooler gas would create areas of lower pressure near the center of a cluster, causing fringe gas to fall inward. In the process, trillions of stars would form.
This isn't what astronomers see when they look at clusters, though.
The Perseus cluster is the brightest known in X-rays, making it a good target for study. It has two large, bubble-shaped cavities that extend away from a central black hole. The cavities are formed by jets of material ejected from the black hole's surroundings, and the jets have been suspected of heating the outlying gas. But scientists couldn't see how.
A special image-processing technique was used to bring out subtle changes in brightness that revealed the presence of ripples -- the sound waves.
Fabian and Allen figure the sound waves, observed spreading out from the cavities, heat the gas. The amount of energy involved is staggering, equal to what would be produced if 100 million stars exploded.
A single, long-sounding note is produced by a sound wave in which the waves are the same size and shape continuously. The newfound note has been sounding, the researchers say, for about 2.5 billion years.
ML/NJ
I'm not a creationist, but I think this is probably the case for this galaxy.
For example, it has been demonstrated that Earth has the right-sized moon to allow life to develop. Life takes a long time to develop. If the moon were smaller (or wasn't there at all), Earth would have an unstable axis: polar regions would change every 100,000 years or so and life wouldn't have a stable environment in which to develop. If the moon were bigger, we'd have an unstable double-planet system. Combined with our relatively quiet location in the galaxy, our abundance of water, our moderate size, our atmosphere and our distance from the sun, I think we have a unique place in the galaxy.
Assuming your calculations are correct, not only would it take 10 million years to get the one cycle, but music is defined as "regular vibrations", so youd have to observe for at least 20 million years to be sure the vibration you first observed was regular.
I think the way the came to the conclusion was to have assigned the "regular vibration" property to the phenomenon then they calculated the number of vibrations per 100 million years to get the pitch.
Wow! You ARE fast!
You must have been reading my mind when I was posting.
Sort of how they are calculating the obama deficit?
Oops, dyslexia strikes again.
"A" above middle C is 440. "A" below middle "C" is 220.
Guess we'll have to re-extrapolate.
One of my physics profs had a recording he’d made of what this would sound like. It was really pretty, a very unique sound.
Yes, I’ve read some of those theories about the moon being a guardian angel for life. It is another reason why I think life may be isolated to earth. The events that allowed the earth to have such a large moon may be very very rare.
I did this at #41 in case you missed it.
ML/NJ
They have numbers for the energy, mass, positions and velocities of the galaxies and particle clouds involved. The configuration is a harmonic oscillator in the first approximation, so they can easily come up with an estimate of what the note is w/o observing an entire wavelength.
“Heh. I beat that in ‘Blazing Saddles’.”
This is very cool.
Gee. I guess my math degrees, physics minor, and those astronomy courses I took didn't do me much good. All I see is a lot of buzzwords in what you write. Maybe you could do some sample math for me. You can even use sines and cosines. I would still have a shot at understanding.
ML/NJ
The ripples are due to the velocity redshifts seen in the radiation from the gas clouds. The gravitational redshifts and positions can be used to find the binding energy, or force constant for the center of mass of the assembly. It can be seen as a reduced mass oscillating according to F=k*x, where k is the gravitational force constant and x is the position of ripple peaks. That oscillator is being driven by the ejecta from the black hole jets; the energy of which is F*x, or 1/2kx2.
"All I see is a lot of buzzwords in what you write. I guess my math degrees, physics minor, and those astronomy courses I took didn't do me much good.
It's a shame.
...and the density indicated by the luminosity...
Teach me.
WTF are ripples?
Is this image you are talking about a simple time lapse image acquired over the 53 hours; or is it more like a race track photo finish image?
ML/NJ
a catalogue from a publisher I bought a book from had a book called Der Klang der Pyramiden, which is in German... the idea is that the concrete representation of the great pyramid derives from the math of Plato’s ideal state which is based in musical harmony - natural cosmic well-formedness - and the great pyramid translates across media into a visual form...
“The secret of the number 5040, described by Plato as the basis of his ideal state, has hitherto been unknown even to classical philologists. Korff has discovered that this number is in fact a pyramid number. It contains the complete total of the dimensions of the Pyramid of Cheops in verifiable measurements.
Through a combination of archaeological intuition and mathematical derivation Korff has succeeded in proving that the angles of inclination of all the Pyramids are formed from musical intervals. Since the sight of the Pyramids cannot be heard, the riddle is solved if we say figuratively: they sound in the eyes, are petrified music, intellectual systems made material. The architects of today have hardly ever succeeded in generating the same fascination as the Egyptian originals in their imitations: they are unaware of the ancient Egyptian knowledge of the harmony of the Pyramids’ inclination.”
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