Wednesday, July 30, 2014

New Cosmic Musical Note - B flat (-57 Octaves)

Ace of Spades HQ had this link in the sidebar about the Chandra X-Ray Observatory studies of the Perseus Cluster, but with a different title. When I started reading it, the musical aspect jumped out at me.


These sound waves are thought to have been produced by explosive events occurring around a supermassive black hole (bright white spot) in Perseus A, the huge galaxy at the center of the cluster. The pitch of the sound waves translates into the note of B flat, 57 octaves below middle-C. This frequency is over a million billion times deeper than the limits of human hearing, so the sound is much too deep to be heard.

 B flat to the minus 57th octave? We're gonna need a bigger bass, um, something or other...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

What difference, at this point, does it make?!?!11?!1/1/1/??!?

:)

Marie said...

That explains all that pesky B-flat in Gregorian chant music! The music of the cosmos. Got it!

Unknown said...

Sound in a vacuum? Nobel prize stuff right there. Star Wars "science" at its best.