[Physics] How to a black hole produce sound

acousticsastrophysicsblack-holesfrequencyvacuum

I was reading this article from NASA — it's NASA — and literally found myself perplexed. The article describes the discovery that black holes emit a "note" that has physical ramifications on the detritus around it.

Sept. 9, 2003: Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have found, for the first time, sound waves from a supermassive black hole. The “note” is the deepest ever detected from any object in our Universe. The tremendous amounts of energy carried by these sound waves may solve a longstanding problem in astrophysics.

The black hole resides in the Perseus cluster of galaxies located 250 million light years from Earth. In 2002, astronomers obtained a deep Chandra observation that shows ripples in the gas filling the cluster. These ripples are evidence for sound waves that have traveled hundreds of thousands of light years away from the cluster’s central black hole.

“The Perseus sound waves are much more than just an interesting form of black hole acoustics,” says Steve Allen, of the Institute of Astronomy and a co-investigator in the research. “These sound waves may be the key in figuring out how galaxy clusters, the largest structures in the Universe, grow.”

Except:

  • Black holes are so massive that light, which is faster than sound, can't escape.
  • Sound can't travel in space (space has too much, well, space)
  • It's a b-flat?

So: How can a black hole produce sound if light can't escape it?

Best Answer

I'm not going to address the production mechanism,1 just the nature of the "sound" in this case.


What you think of as the hard vacuum of outer space could just as well be seen as a very, very, very diffuse, somewhat ionized gas. That gas can support sound waves as long as the wavelength is considerably longer than the mean free path of the atoms on the gas.

As for the tone, there is a simple relationship between the tone of the same name in different octaves, so once they know the dominant frequency they can figure its place on the scale.


1 Though it won't be happening inside the event horizon -- which is where "not even light can escape" holds -- but in the region around the hole proper where it accumulates gas and dust and the magnetic fields from the hole play merry havoc with the ionized components of the accumulated stuff.