Hear the voice of a black hole

Hear the voice of a black hole

If you could hear things that revolve around black holes, super dense white dwarfs and young stars, how would that sound? Probably like empty space on the radio dial, say the researchers.

Simon Scaringi - Researcher at the Max-Planck Institute in Germany, investigated accretion disks around massive objects. An accretion disk is an accumulation of matter that forms in the form of a disk around a rotating object. Scaring and his team watched the flickering light emissions of galactic nuclei, black holes, young stellar objects and white dwarfs, which are torn off remnants of massive stars. Below you can hear the “voice” of a black hole:

Using the observations of the NASA space telescope Kepler, ground-based instruments and the satellite of the European Space Agency XMM-Newton, scientists found that the flickering is accompanied by sounds.

“This is something that I always wanted to try to do,” said Space.com Scaringi. “This project gave me a good reason for trying. For me, this is an obvious way to explain this study. ... I can show that this is a different type of noise. ” The flicker comes from the energy released by the material in the accretion disks, which falls towards the central object. Scaringi considered the frequency of flashes in sound waves; for example, a frequency of 10 flashes per second was converted to waves consisting of 10 cycles per second, or 10 Hz. Scaringi has converted frequencies to the range of human hearing, since most of them would be too low for human hearing.

The result is pure noise - a sound that helps illustrate the main output of the command: the sound of the accretion disks converted higher or lower remains basically the same, regardless of how massive the object is in the center of the disk.

For many people, this discovery can be intuitive; finally, by stirring the cream in the coffee, a shape that looks like a spiral galaxy is obtained. Both scientists and philosophers noted similarities between the shapes of spiral galaxies and accretion disks around stars.

Intuition, however, often fails. Many scientists were convinced that the same physical laws apply at different scales. One of the questions, according to Scaringi, is relativity. Black holes, for example, have a mass of several Suns - millions or billions of Suns in the case of supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies. The difference in gravitational forces between regions near the black hole and the “point of no return” is called the event horizon, which is more important for remote regions, while relatively small for young stars. The Scaringi team has shown that the behavior of the accretion disks will scale; you can apply the same basic laws for a big black hole or galaxy, or young Solar system. But the mechanism is still unknown.

“As far as detailed modeling is concerned, we are still not far from that,” said Scaringi. “We seem to have noticed that, it turns out, they are all similar, in scaling, but the detailed physics of the scale ratio is not yet clear.”

The study is given in the October 9 issue of Science Advances.

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