Note: A lot of people are responding that this is an audio recording generated from the image of a black hole taken by NASA, and therefore our post is inaccurate. Fortunately, we’re a metal site, not a science journal. We specialize in creepy sounds, and wherever this came from, it’s creepy. That said, please do not use cite this post as part of your senior thesis.
Ever seen the movie Event Horizon? Damn, son, if you haven’t, you gotta get on that. The basic premise is that a revolutionary spaceship containing black-hole-based teleportation technology returns after fifteen years, and a crew is sent out to examine it. Of course, they find out that when the ship first used its dark matter transporter, it opened a portal into the dimension we call Hell, and has returned as a living conduit of the eternal darkness and agony of that unholy place. It’s a rare example of a late-’90s horror movie and a space horror movie that pulls off everything it wanted to do (of course, it bombed at the box office). And it might also be a portent of things to come, because NASA has released an audio recording of what a black hole “sounds” like, and as you can imagine, it ain’t exactly heartwarming.
As you’ll hear in the clip included below via journalist Alex Eccleston, the audio recording of a black hole taken by NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory could sound like a lot of things. Maybe it’s a motorcycle engine heard by someone at the bottom of a pool, or a refrigerator fan on its last legs screaming for someone to put it out of its misery. But it sure as hell sounds like a chorus of ghosts to us! It’s as though someone sampled that murky noise at the beginning of Marilyn Manson’s “Sweet Dreams” cover and then looped it over itself into perpetuity. What generates the actual sound isn’t clear — is this space rubbing against itself as it’s sucked into the singularity? Is…is this space nutting? — but it definitely affirms our desire to never, ever leave this planet. I can rest easy dying without having visited Science Hell.
Listen to the recording below and try to repress a shudder of Lovecraftian hatred.