Janna Levin, professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College and author of Black Hole Blues, describes the noise that black holes make this way: “You could say black holes are playing drums out there. Space-time is the drum, and black holes are the mallets.” The collision of two black holes, 30 times the mass of the sun and 1.3 billion light-years away, was captured by LIGO as a loud chirp. In this short video, Levin explains how scientists were able to record gravitational waves as sound waves and, for the first time ever, give space a "soundtrack."
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