![]() ![]() ![]() Astronomers suspect that these waves act as a brake on star formation, keeping the gas in the cluster too hot to condense into new stars. With a period of oscillation of 10 million years, the sound waves were acoustically equivalent to a B-flat 57 octaves below middle C, a tone that the black hole has apparently been holding for the last two billion years. They were caused by periodic explosions from a supermassive black hole at the center of the cluster, which is 250 million light-years away and contains thousands of galaxies. They were pressure waves - that is to say, sound waves - 30,000 light-years across and radiating outward through the thin, ultrahot gas that suffuses galaxy clusters. ![]() In 2003 astrophysicists working with NASA’s orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory detected a pattern of ripples in the X-ray glow of a giant cluster of galaxies in the constellation Perseus. In space you can’t hear a black hole scream, but apparently you can hear it sing. ![]()
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