A truly enormous collection of thousands of galaxies, th Perseus Cluster - like othe large galaxy clusters - isfilled with hot, x-ray emitting gas.The x-ray hot gas(not the individual galaxies) appearsin the left panel above, a false colo imagefrom the Chandra Observatory.The bright central source flanked by tw dark cavities isthe cluster's supermassive black hole.At right, the panel shows th x-ray imagedata specially processedto enhance contrasts and reveals a strikingly regularpattern of pressure wave rippling throughthe hot gas. In other words soundwaves, likely generated by bursts ofactivity from the black hole, are ringing through thePerseus Galaxy Cluster.Astronomers infer that these previously unknown sound waves are asource of energy which keeps the cluster gas so hot So what note is the Perseus Cluster playing?Estimates of the distance between the wave peaks and sound speedin the cluster gas suggeststhe cosmic note is about 57 octaves below B-flat above middle C.
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