NASA captures eerie 'sounds' from black hole and it's one of the creepiest things people have ever heard

NASA has created a creepy audio clip of sound waves rippling from a supermassive black hole in space.

The black hole is located at the centre of the Perseus galaxy cluster, located 250 million light-years away. And the sound waves coming from it have been shifted up by 57 and 58 octaves to make them audible to human ears.

The US space agency released the audio back in 2022, and the best way to describe it is an otherworldly howling that sounds both spooky and a little angry.

This is the first time these sound waves have been extracted and made audible. If you're curious, have a listen yourself:

So, why was this audio created?

Well in 2003, astronomers made a giant discovery.

They found that acoustic waves were travelling through the vast gas surrounding the supermassive black hole which is now famous for its haunting wails.

Of course, we wouldn't be able to hear them at their current pitch.

In fact, the waves contain the lowest note ever detected in the universe, way below human hearing.

But with some audio processing, these waves were shifted up by several octaves so we can get a feel for what they’d sound like echoing through space.

The sound waves were extracted from all directions around the black hole and played in an anti-clockwise direction to give us a 360-degree experience.

Interestingly, we can hear the sounds in all directions from the supermassive black hole at pitches 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency.

SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY / Getty

But that doesn't make the sound any less eerie.

The audio was shared by Guardian News on YouTube and viewers have been expressing their reactions.

One viewer wrote: "I love how it sounds EXACTLY as you would expect a black hole to sound."

Another added: "That's about what I expected to hear from a blackhole. Truly terrifying. It sounds like it's just devouring hope itself. Such awesome power."

Others were more unsettled by it: "The fact that the sound gives me an "existential horror" feeling is fitting for what a black hole actually is" and another claimed: "That is legitimately one of the creepiest sounds I've ever heard."

Beyond the curiosity side of things, this type of audio could help us understand star formation.

These sound waves travelling through the hot gas and plasma in galaxy clusters actually carry energy, helping heat the medium and could play a role in how galaxy clusters evolve over time.