An extraordinary piece called Black Hole Symphony translates cutting-edge research on black holes into an electro-symphonic score with five movements. Museum of Science in Boston, Massachusetts, and Multiverse Concert Series On 28 July and 25 AugustTAKE a second to imagine the sound of the cosmos. What comes to mind? Is it the howling winds of a far-flung exoplanet? The roiling eruptions at the surface of the sun? Or simply the nothingness that would greet you in the boundless vacuum of space?
BLACK HOLE SYMPHONY is an immersive new production from the Museum of Science, Boston and Multiverse Concert Series. Audiences embark on an symphonic journey through spacetime, performed by a live chamber orchestra accompanied by stunning, immersive planetarium visuals by the animators of the Charles Hayden Planetarium.This revolutionary new show is a unique collaboration between astrophysicists of the Harvard-Smithsonian CFA and Black Hole Initiative, animators from the Museum of Science, Boston and Multiverse musicians. Composer David Ibbett has sonified (light->sound) the light of black hole galaxies as musical notes and chords, woven into a dramatic electro-symphonic score that reveals a hidden universe beyond the scope of our eyes,Over the course of an evening, audiences are plunged into deep space riding relativistic jets of plasma, guided through the dense dust torus, broad-line clouds, and ultimately reach the blazing accretion disk on the event horizon of a supermassive black hole.A flying mirror made by blasting a gas of electrons and ions with a powerful laser could help solve a long-standing mystery known as the black hole information paradox.
This paradox arose in 1974 when Stephen Hawking calculated that, according to quantum theory, black holes should emit small amounts of electromagnetic radiation until they eventually evaporate. This so-called Hawking radiation doesn’t hold any information about what fell into the black hole in the first place.A solitary celestial object — more massive than the sun, yet far smaller — is wandering the galaxy a few thousand light-years from Earth. It might be the first isolated stellar-mass black hole to be detected in the Milky Way. Or it might be one of the heaviest neutron stars known.
The interstellar wanderer first revealed itself in 2011, when its gravity briefly magnified the light from a more distant star. But at the time, its true nature eluded researchers. Now, two teams of astronomers have analyzed Hubble Space Telescope images to unmask the traveler’s identity — and have come to somewhat different conclusions.But another group of researchers, led by astronomer Casey Lam at the University of California, Berkeley, found different results. Lam and her colleagues calculated that the mass of the lensing object was lower, only about two to four times the mass of the sun. It could therefore be either a neutron star or a black hole, the group concluded.
Whatever it is, it’s an intriguing object, says astronomer Jessica Lu, a member of Lam’s team also at UC Berkeley. That’s because it’s a bit of an oddball in terms of mass. It’s either one of the most massive neutron stars discovered to date, or it’s one of the least massive black holes known, Lu says. “It falls within this strange region we call the mass gap.”
Despite the disagreement, these are thrilling results, says Will M. Farr, an astrophysicist at Stony Brook University in New York not involved in either study. “To be working at the instrumental limit at the real forefront of what’s measurable is very exciting.”
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