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The Sound of a Black Hole
Snags writes "Astronomers have used the Chandra X-ray Observatory to observe the deepest, lowest-frequency sound waves ever observed. By my calculations, the 'B-Flat 57 octaves below middle-C' has a period of 9.8 million years. Despite arguments that explosions in space movies should be silent, it is legitimate to call these sound waves because at that frequency, particles of space dust can 'see' each other through gravity. These notes are 'over a million billion times deeper than the limits of human hearing', so to call it infra-sound would be a bit of an understatement."
Infrasound! Now that explains why many people have this irrational fear of black holes! :-)
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
When I read "The Sound of a Black Hole"
the sound I heard in my mind was "oh shit there's a black hole!"
So this is a 639 year concert that has started in Germany. The concert has been ongoing for 17 months (the initial "quiet period" of the organ filling) however the first three note chord has been hit.
Boy wish I had that kind of time to waste... Imagine the monks 630 years from now going - "Well, this is over now - what the hell are we going to do now ?"
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
They're not saying that infra-radiation is sound--they used the telescope to see ripples in the gas. That's the sound.
AKA "a giant sucking sound."
B-Flat 57 octaves below middle-C, and it's the sound of a black hole. My , they've discovered the brown note!
Umm, sorry for that...
My extreme audiophile friend now has to replace his whole system to capture the experience of these new sounds.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
I wouldn't buy tickets to a music-playing blackhole concert. They suck.
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Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
Black holes rely on an assumption that gravity has no limits on its strength, and to some extent on it following a strict Newtonian curve.
Thinking of "curves" in space-time is an interesting analogy for gravity, but still doesn't address the mechanism - sure, the planet may be on a "45 degree" incline in spacetime, but what forces it down... and not up? You would nearly have to posit the existence of some constant stream of gravitons coming at 'right angles' to three-dimensional space in order to actually push things 'down the well'.
There are alternate corpuscular (i.e. caused by particles; "quantum") models of the mechanism of gravity. There's the LeSagian model, with modern reworks that range from the bizarre-yet-possible theories of Tom Van Flandern, to the more "moderate" theories of Paul Stowe explaining how the "drag" factor that detractors expect doesn't show up, in exactly the sort of way that Feynman expressed it for electromagnetism.
The LeSage-type theories are, in general, "push" theories, which operate in a medium filled with gravitons (just as space is filled with photons) that are deflected/absorbed near bodies and cast 'shadows' that create a low "pressure" area close to surfaces and, to a lesser extent, between bodies.
The formulae calculate out approximately to Newton's/GR's gravity equation, but with some interesting exceptions:
This upper limit on the strength of gravity may prevent the ultimate collapse that black hole theory requires.
Black holes are still a theoretical construct. Even the jets, now often taken as a 'sign' of a black hole, are still a largely unexplained phenomenon, one that is also associated with accretion disks for newly-forming stars.
So if something's singing in that cloud, it may not be as dense as it's accused of being.
I apologize for all the jargon. I shall go read another thread on SCO as just punishment :)
Binary geeks can count to 1,023 on their fingers
I'm on the team that did this. Ask any questions you like!
Would you like some toast?
-Talkie Toaster
Look, I don't want any toast, and he doesn't want any toast. In fact, no one around here wants any toast. Not now, not ever. No toast!
Or muffins! Or muffins! We don't like muffins around here! We want no muffins, no toast, no teacakes, no buns, baps, baguettes or bagels, no croissants, no crumpets, no pancakes, no potato cakes and no hot-cross buns and definitely no smegging flapjacks!