Tag: black hole

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A Hole in the Silence

In space, no one can hear you scream. Unless you’re a black hole, apparently.

File this one under “weird but true”: a few days ago, NASA released the sound of a black hole to the internet. More specifically, a low, unsettling moan that prompted one online listener to declare “Space is haunted.”

What in the name of George Lucas is going on here?

After all, most of us learned the same thing as kids: there’s no sound in space. Well, unless you live in the Star Wars universe, where fast things roar and big things rumble because it’s Just That Cool. I mean, what’s the point of a space battle if you can’t rock an entire movie theater with the blaster bolts and explosions, am I right?

But for a galaxy that’s not run by Industrial Light & Magic, we’re used to thinking of things as being spooky silent. No air to push. Therefore no sound waves. Right?

Well, it turns out we all should have paid better attention in science class. Because as often happens, what “everyone knows” isn’t quite the whole story.

This particular black hole, you see, is in the midst of the Perseus galaxy cluster. A star cluster has hot gas. Gas that can transmit sound. Not very much, not very well – NASA had to enhance this one like a 1980s rock concert, to present a sensation that’s normally 57 piano keyboards below our hearing range – but enough to make a faint impression.

I don’t know about you, but I find that weirdly hopeful.

Space gives a different perspective on things, both overwhelming and awe-inspiring. Earlier this year, when the first images came back from the Webb space telescope, it made some people feel small while others felt connected to something wonderful. (For the record, I’m in the latter camp.)

This touches something similar. Once again, it’s a wonder that most of us didn’t expect. Not a vast interstellar panorama but the smallest of whispers in a sea of silence. Waiting … but only if you know how to listen.

And sometimes that seems about as rare as a sound in space.

We’re not a patient people, by and large. So many of us feel the need to do something and do it now. One reason the early pandemic lockdowns were so unsettling, I suspect, is that for the first time a lot of us had to hold still … and had almost forgotten how to do it.

The thing is, it’s not hard to make an impression. Even a black hole in the middle of nowhere can do it. What’s harder is to step back and actually see beyond our own impressions and efforts. To experience and understand. To be.

How many things do we miss hearing because our head is filled with our own chatter?

How much do we ignore without knowing we’re missing something worthwhile? It might be as vast as a black hole … or as small as the person next to you.

Hear the silent. Listen for the impossible. Touch lightly. Once we’ve learned that, we’ll know that even a murmur can matter. That the acts we do take, however small they may seem, always leave something behind.

Give everything its space. Haunted or not.

That’s the hole lesson right there.

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The Hole Truth

Who knew that nothing could be so fascinating?

OK, technically a black hole is something. A rather large something, at that. But the image in my mind has always been a bit like the Nothing in The Neverending Story, an unstoppable void that consumes everything in its path. Inexorable. Powerful.

And apparently, beautiful.

Recently, humanity received its first-ever photo of a black hole – darkness surrounded by a burning ring of fire, as though it had been willed into being by a Johnny Cash fan. Millions stopped for just a minute to literally stare into space, and not just because they were still mourning the demise of their March Madness bracket.

Who knew that it would look like this?

I’m still trying to decide why it’s so fascinating. Granted, I’m a longtime space geek, so I find just about anything in the Great Beyond fascinating. But this has – pardon the phrase – a real pull.

Is it the unexpected beauty of it all, like the colors and designs once captured by the Hubble space telescope?

Is it the sense of perspective, the understanding that amazing and marvelous things are happening beyond our reach and influence, the same sense of momentary awe we get at a solar eclipse?

Is it the labor that went into it, the research and invention and collaboration involved? The final photo was a composite of several photos – parts making up the hole, if you will – and the path there required just as many pieces to fit together.

All of it’s true. All of it’s important. But in my own mind, the most stunning piece of all may be the novelty. We had literally never seen this before. We had theorized black holes, modeled them, knew that they existed and how they worked. But no human eye had ever looked on one.

Until now.

The mightiest pull in space does not belong to a black hole. It belongs to discovery. One of the most famous science fiction franchises of all time even has the concept embedded in its prologue: “To boldly go where no man has gone before.”

Human curiosity is a restless thing, and we have boldly gone in a lot of directions in exploring our world and its phenomena. So much so that we sometimes to live in the midst of an age of wonder – and yawn. As a species, we’re sometimes on the verge of becoming the teenager that’s seen it all, for whom there’s nothing left to do. “Crossed the continents, explored the genome, created the Dairy Queen Blizzard. Oh, well, guess I’ll watch TV.”

But wonder doesn’t die so easily.  It waits, patient and timeless. And a good thing, too. If wonder ever truly ceased to be, that would pretty much be our end as a species – we might still exist, but we wouldn’t truly live.

But it still stubbornly flares to life, light and fire illuminating the darkness. It might originate from something as simple as a tale well told, or as grand as the first glance of a cosmic marvel. But it becomes a reminder that there is still so much to discover, still so much to see. That with a universe to experience, we’ve barely stepped beyond our front stoop.

That’s an exciting potential. It inspires hope that we can be more than who we are, that today’s world may only be the beginning. That the stress of the moment may eventually be consumed by the potential of the moment ahead.

That’s a lot to pull out of a hole.

But sometimes, Nothing really matters.