Astronomers have detected sound waves from a super-massive black hole. The "note" is the deepest ever detected from an object in the Universe.
The black hole lives in the Perseus cluster of galaxies, located 250 million light-years away. The pitch of the sound can be determined. Although far too low to be heard, it is calculated to be B flat. With a frequency over a million, billion times deeper than the limits of human hearing, it is the deepest note ever detected from an object in the Universe. The B-flat pitch of the sound wave, 57 octaves below middle-C, would have remained roughly constant for about 2.5 billion years.
by Dr. David Whitehouse, BBC News Online science editor
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Wow! This MUST mean that space cannot be a vacuum because sound being a wave, must travel through something. If there is this note being trasmitted to us, it has to vibrate through something. That something is just beyond our current tools of detection. Smaller than a quark. I wonder what that is?
And if a tree falls in a forest with noone around... the whole univerise will hear it.
Cool post, thanks! What's the Hz of B flat 57 octaves below middle-C? I've heard of megaherz, but that might be milli or micro herz. One beat ever thousand or million seconds!! And I'm assuming that we're talking an electromagnetic wave in the "sound" level of frequency - not literal sound waves through a material medium.
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