If you’ve seen “Interstellar,” you may think you have a pretty good idea of what a black hole sounds like, but as they say, truth is stranger than fiction.
In the hit Christopher Nolan movie from 2014, Matthew McConaughey’s character Joseph Cooper enters a black hole, where he only notes “flashes of light in the blackness,” and the audience hears nothing but the creaking of his ship and debris striking the vessel.
In reality, however, NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program captured the sound produced by a black hole, and it sounds like something more akin to scary spirits than stars.
First, some science. NASA noted that it’s a “misconception that there is no sound in space.”
You’ve heard that space is a vacuum, and while that’s mostly true, “A galaxy cluster has so much gas that we’ve picked up actual sound,” NASA noted, adding that the sound waves have been “amplified, and mixed with other data” in the video.
Now, to the 30-second clip posted to Twitter, which could easily be appropriated as the soundtrack to a ghost movie.
Many Twitter users agreed, and despite more than 113,000 retweets and and 462,000 likes, it seems unlikely that any future interplanetary explorers found their calling due to this video.
User @TeddyRubsxkin noted that what NASA found is “creepier than the previous notion” of what a black hole might sound like.
“As an astronaut, I’d rather hear nothing over whatever that sound is,” they added.
Another user, @MangaDungeon, simply noted that “space is haunted,” a reference to a viral tweet about astronauts needing guns on the moon.
Many users found a religious feeling in the noise, noting that the black hole sounds like “Om,” the primordial sound of the universe according to Hinduism.
“You guys won’t get it until you follow sanatan dharma..it is the sound of OM…its written thousands years back in our religious books that the frequency of OM ia same as universe,” @balram112511 wrote.
Others, however, felt many people were reading too much into it.
“This is absolute garbage nonsense,” said @sussexrock457.
Still others did what the internet does best.
User @plainviewpar was able to further refine the sound using “alternative processing.”
“By amplifying, correcting and mixing with other data, the black hole sounds quite different,” they noted.