NASA Releases New Black Hole Visualizations - and Sonifications - as Astronomers Study X-Ray Echoes

NASA has released some surprisingly colorful visualization of black holes. Digital Trends explains their origins:We're coming to the end of Black Hole Week, NASA's celebration of the beastly cosmic monsters which suck in light, matter, and everything else that comes too close to them.... As part of the festivities, the media department at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has shared a selection of some of the best visualizations of black holes, so you can get an idea of what these mind-bending phenomena are like. The images, which are also available as desktop and mobile wallpapers should you wish to decorate your devices with black hole imagery, show simulations and visualizations created to try and picture what the weird effects of the extreme gravitational forces around a black hole would be. NASA describes this as "translating the inherently digital data (in the form of ones and zeroes) captured by telescopes in space into images, [creating] visual representations of what would otherwise be invisible to us." "But what about experiencing these data with other senses, like hearing' "Sonification is the process that translates data into sound. Our new project brings parts of our Milky Way galaxy, and of the greater Universe beyond it, to listeners for the first time." And elsewhere, CNN reports astronomers used the unique X-ray echoes released by rare "binary" black hole-star systems to identify six more such systems. (Only two were known previously.) And then converted their data into sound waves.The team tracked changes in the X-ray echoes, determined time lags during transition stages and traced commonalities in the evolution of each black hole outburst. The result sounds like something from a 1950s sci-fi film.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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