OT: Black Hole Bass Note

[John Musselwhite]

Hi Folks...

I ran across this on the NASA mailing list, and while it doesn't really 
have anything to do with pianos, it mentions them. The entire news release 
should be found at http://chandra.nasa.gov but here is an excerpt:

"RELEASE: 03-284

CHANDRA "HEARS" A BLACK HOLE

      NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory detected sound waves,
for the first time, from a super-massive black hole. The
"note" is the deepest ever detected from an object in the
universe. The tremendous amounts of energy carried by these
sound waves may solve a longstanding problem in
astrophysics.
[...]
"We have observed the prodigious amounts of light and heat
created by black holes, now we have detected the sound,"
said Andrew Fabian of the Institute of Astronomy (IoA) in
Cambridge, England, and leader of the study.

In musical terms, the pitch of the sound generated by the
black hole translates into the note of B flat. But, a human
would have no chance of hearing this cosmic performance,
because the note is 57 octaves lower than middle-C (by
comparison a typical piano contains only about seven
octaves). At a frequency over a million, billion times
deeper than the limits of human hearing, this is the deepest
note ever detected from an object in the universe."
--------------------------------

And apropos from another list... "The universe is full of amazing things, 
waiting patiently for our wits to grow sharper."

			John