Loud Black Hole

X-rays from a disk of hot gas around a supermassive black hole in NGC 1275 push back at gas that's falling into the black hole, creating sound waves. Although the waves are far below the range of human hearing, astronomers recently pitched them up 57 to 58 octaves to make them audible. The black hole is about 800 million times the mass of the Sun. NGC 1275 is at the center of the Perseus Cluster, one of the largest galaxy clusters yet seen. Hot gas in the cluster falls into NGC 1275, where it's funneled toward a disk of superhot gas around the black hole. This composite image includes visible light captured by the Sloan Sky Survey, X-rays (blue) from Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and radio waves (pink) from the Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico. [Marie-Lou Gendron-Marsolais (Université de Montréal), Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo (Université de Montréal), Maxime Pivin Lapointe]