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<\/figure>\n Today in questions you never knew you wanted the answer to: What\u2019s a black hole sound like? Turns out, the depths of the darkest reaches of oblivion \u201csound\u201d a whole lot like a video game, according to a NASA data sonification.<\/p>\n \u201cSound\u201d is in quotes there because a sonification<\/span> is not a literal audio recording, sent hundreds of millions of light years directly into YouTube\u2019s compression algorithm. Rather, it\u2019s the result of a technological process<\/span> in which NASA takes its array of space data and then transposes it into a form the human brain can actually comprehend. Previous data sonifications<\/span> have taken the form of soothing, ambient soundscapes. Some, like that of the Bullet Cluster<\/span>\u2014an extrasolar discovery that first proved the existence of dark matter\u2014sound remarkably like a bonus track from one of Thom Yorke\u2019s 71 side projects.<\/p>\n But a black hole\u2014specifically, the black hole at the center of the perennially<\/span> enigmatic<\/span> Perseus Galaxy Cluster<\/span>, a gaggle of galaxies some 240 million-odd light years away\u2014is less fit to get pressed onto an LP. If anything, it\u2019s aurally close to nothing, a persistent low hum that conveys unease and ominous emptiness.<\/p>\n Nailing down the sound of Perseus has long been a target of NASA\u2019s interest.<\/p>\n \u201cSince 2003, the black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster has been associated with sound,\u201d NASA wrote in a press release<\/span>. \u201cThis is because astronomers discovered that pressure waves sent out by the black hole caused ripples in the cluster\u2019s hot gas that could be translated into a note. \u2026 The popular misconception that there is no sound in space originates with the fact that most of space is essentially a vacuum, providing no medium for sound waves to propagate through. A galaxy cluster, on the other hand, has copious amounts of gas that envelop the hundreds or even thousands of galaxies within it, providing a medium for the sound waves to travel.\u201d<\/p>\n To create the sonification, NASA took those sound waves and scaled them up by nearly 60 octaves. The initial sound is so incomprehensibly low that we\u2019re \u201chearing\u201d it tuned up, at minimum, by 144 quadrillion times its actual pitch. (On the high end, NASA estimates that figure could be closer to 288 quadrillion; either way, there\u2019s no way a human brain could even register an unmanipulated version of it.) This particular data sonification was first indexed in May, but the agency recently posted it again on social media over the weekend. Its most recent outing on the internet quickly attained supernova viral status. As of this writing, the clip has been played more than 8.9 million times.<\/p>\n