Black hole produces 'lowest note known in universe' Last
Updated: Saturday, September 27, 2003 | 5:02 PM ET Researchers
used NASA's orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory to "listen" to
wavelengths coming from the heart of the Perseus A Cluster, a
giant clump of galaxies 250 million light-years from Earth (A
light-year is the distance light travels in a year in a vacuum,
about 9.5 trillion kilometres.) They found the pitch of the
sound is about 57 octaves below middle C, which is roughly the
middle of a standard piano keyboard. The tone frequency is more
than a million, billion times deeper than the limits of the
human ear, the researchers said. A processed image from Chandra
showing central region of the Perseus galaxy cluster
Courtesy:NASA/CXC/IoA/A.Fabian et al Prof. Andrew Fabian of the
Institute of Astronomy (IoA) in Cambridge, England, led the
53-hour Chandra observation. The discovery was described at a
NASA news conference in Washington on Tuesday. It is "the lowest
note known in the universe," said Fabia