Listen to the melodic song of a supermassive black hole in the Milky Way… that woke up 200 years ago

June 22, 2023, 13:24 | Updated: June 22, 2023, 13:34

Scientists believe that galactic musical sounds were emitted from the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole in the early 19th century.

The Milky Way has a supermassive black hole at its galactic center, some 26,000 light-years from Earth. Its name is Sagittarius A*, often abbreviated as Sgr A*, and its mass is 4.1 million times that of our sun.

In the findings published yesterday, scientists say they noticed a strange sound coming from the black hole, detected by POTThe IXPE spacecraft of .

Their research indicates that this sound, an apparently melodic chant, is an echo of a violent outburst released by the black hole in the early 19th century (listen above).

The findings suggest that a mass of gas and dust got too close to the black hole, causing it to wake up from a dormant state and gobble up materials.

When a black hole feeds on gas and dust, bursts of bright X-ray light bounce back and echo, which can then be turned into sound waves.

Read more: NASA Releases Spooky Black Hole ‘Sing’ And It’s Straight Out Of A Horror Movie

The echo was detected after astronomers at France’s Strasbourg Astronomical Observatory noticed that huge clouds of star-forming molecular gas, living near Sgr A*, were brighter in X-rays than usual.

According to observations published on June 21 in Nature magazinethe light probably did not come from inside the gas clouds, but was reflected from them, after an outburst of the black hole.

A team led by Frédéric Marin at the University of Strasbourg used NASA’s IXPE satellite and found the theory highly plausible.

“It reveals the past awakening of this gigantic object, which is four million times more massive than the Sun,” Marin said.

Read more: NASA releases the impressive and beautiful sound of the Butterfly Nebula

Since the spacecraft can reveal information about how light was produced and reflected, the scientists were able to deduce that the origins of the X-rays were in the vicinity of Sgr A* and that they were emitted just over 200 years ago.

The sonification above, which is adapted from NASA visual data, shows a curved line running through the image, starting at the bottom right corner. As it passes over the IXPE data, sounds like digital winds are activated.

“Our work presents the missing evidence that X-rays from giant molecular clouds are due to reflection from an intense but short-lived flare produced at or near Sagittarius A*,” Marin added.

We don’t know exactly what got so close to Sagittarius A* that it was torn apart by the forces around it. But we know that he has produced this extraordinary and disturbing echo, and a huge acoustic scream from the depths of the cosmos.