Supermassive Black Hole
Sound Wave
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The pioneering video artist and sculptor Nam June Paik
believed that the only kulcha which will exist in the future
is the one that can exist in peoples’ heads. My people been
provin’ him right since the slave ships. Just as we know now
that Dark Matter is how the Kosmos kicks bass out the
trunk. The Nigerian playwright, novelist and activist Wole
Soyinka once observed that Rhythm is the most felt and
the most immaterial force in the world. Rhythm is the
quintessence of what we mean by Dark Energy. The ability
to accelerate and expand the size of the known universe
with nothing more than a James Brown breakbeat, DJ Kool
Herc on the mic (70s version of Ras The Exhorter) and
The Nigger Twins out on the floor.
Dark Energy is the ripple effect of That Body Rock.
Dark Matter can be found anywhere in the atl where you
find a pole dancing booty clapper.
Buffie the Body is all the scientific proof for Dark Matter’s
existence that the universe has ever felt a need to provide.
Dark Matter is all about the butt cold doing the knowledge.
Whole empires and industries are held together by the myth
and gravitational effect of Buffie’s GA dunk a dunk. What
Frank Zappa called Cosmic Debris, we now know to really
be Cosmic Ga Dunk a Dunk.
Dark Matter knows how to aim high and git low too.
Too hot to handle, too cold to hold because Dark Matter
stands for Ass Control.
“A Cosmic fog horn warning of the dangers of coming too close.”
Are we really talking about a Cosmic fog horn warning
surrounding material of the dangers of coming too close or
are we talking about Cosmological Booty Claps, Singularities
of Black Joy going down way way down low in a Black Hole
Clusterfuck?
After observing the Perseus galaxy cluster for 53 hours in
August 2002, the Chandra X-ray Observatory revealed ripples
in the hot gas that fills the cluster. These ripples appear to be
sound waves that would register as a B flat if we could hear
the deep tone.
The team that discovered the waves determined the frequency
by calculating the speed of sound in that environment and
measuring the distance between wave crests. The frequency
is about one cycle (or wave) per 9.5 million years or so —
corresponding to a B-flat note about 57 octaves below middle
C on a piano.
It’s the deepest note ever detected and the first sound waves
identified from a black hole.
Dark Matter kicks Bass on the down low.
Git low git low git low
“We have observed the prodigious amounts of light and heat
created by black holes, now we have detected the sound,”
said team leader Andrew Fabian of the Institute of Astronomy
in England. The ripples extend hundreds of thousands of
light-years from the supermassive black hole at the center of
Perseus A (a.k.a. ngc 1275), the dominant member of the
galaxy cluster. Fabian’s group suspects that they are created
when two 50,000-light-year-wide cavities, excavated by
jets from the black hole, push against the surrounding gas.
These cavities also appear in Chandra’s observations. The
sound waves could explain why the x-ray-emitting gas in the
Perseus cluster has remained hot instead of cooling off (as
astronomers would expect). When sound waves move through
the gas, they’re eventually absorbed by it and transfer their
energy to the gas. To provide the energy necessary to keep the
gas heated, the sound must have been continuous for roughly
2.5 billion years.
There’s a dance that the people do, I don’t know how it started.
Can’t stop, won’t stop.
Git low git low.
So my friend Torkwase Dyson asked me the most blunt
and brutal question the other day.
She said, “why haven’t Black visual artists achieved what
Black musicians have?”
I soon discovered that for her it wasn’t really a question,
but actually a declaration of War on the massive hole missing
from the center of contemporary Black Art practice.
004-greg-tate.indd 10
3/27/11 11:20 AM