Music of Heaven

by Bruce Nutting

Title

Music of Heaven

Artist

Bruce Nutting

Medium

Painting - Digital

Description

Music of the Heavens Turns Out to Sound a Lot Like a B Flat
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: September 16, 2003

Astronomers say they have heard the sound of a black hole singing. And what it is singing, and perhaps has been singing for more than two billion years, they say, is B flat -- a B flat 57 octaves lower than middle C.

The ''notes'' appear as pressure waves roiling and spreading as a result of outbursts from a supermassive black hole through a hot thin gas that fills the Perseus cluster of galaxies, 250 million light-years distant. They are 30,000 light-years across and have a period of oscillation of 10 million years. By comparison, the deepest, lowest notes that humans can hear have a period of about one-twentieth of a second.

The black hole is playing ''the lowest note in the universe,'' said Dr. Andrew Fabian, an X-ray astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy at Cambridge University in England.

Dr. Fabian was the leader on an international team that used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to detect the black hole's notes as ripples of luminosity in the X-ray glow of the cluster. The discovery, announced last week at NASA headquarters in Washington and in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of Royal Astronomical Society, might help solve longstanding problems regarding the structure of galaxy clusters, the largest, most massive objects in the universe, and the evolution of galaxies within them, astronomers said."

(http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/16/science/music-of-the-heavens-turns-out-to-sound-a-lot-like-a-b-flat.html)

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May 12th, 2014

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