The Pop Corporation

Get ready for the most satisfying phrase you’ll hear in 2023. Astronomers have been looking toward space, as they are want to do, and have noticed something super cool. They’ve been using their ears as well as their eyes, and have found a magic thing.

A cosmic bass note.

If you’ve ever ingested any kind of recreational drug and listened to music at the same time, you may well have imagined a particularly nice bassline as being pretty cosmic, and now, the universe is nodding in agreement and it’s all because of gravitational waves which they reckon produces the slow-motion mergers of supermassive black holes across the universe, and those cause super low frequency bass tones in the fabric of space and time and all that ace stuff.

The clever people are hoping that this will give us more information on the gigantic black holes which sit in the centre of a number of galaxies. We’re suddenly getting more into ambient music at the thought of it all.

If these things being billions of times the mass of the sun wasn’t enough, now we find out they’re bass generators, and we’re in complete love.

“This is huge news,” said Dr Stephen Taylor, chair of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (Nanograv) consortium. Gravitational Wave Consortium is a cool band name too. Now, this isn’t Dub heavy. It’s far weightier than that. A single wave travelling at the speed of light would take around 30 years to trundle past Earth. Mega, mega heavy bass. The experts reckon that this cosmic bassline is most likely generated by the ENTIRE POPULATION of supermassive black hole binaries over 8 billion years of being. Each of the black holes contributing to this symphony of bass!

That’s the most prog thing we’ve ever heard in our lives. Get the modular synths out!!!

And in more cool word news, this tone was found because the science gang were monitoring pulsars, which are boujie stars that spin hundreds of times a second, and fire out radio waves so regularly that you can track any changes in the timing caused by the stretching of the fabric of space. What a job this lot have. How psychedelically wonderful.

Now, teams in Europe, Indie, China and Australia have all looked into t and yep, looks like there’s a cosmic bassline in space. How great is that. We hope they stick something on Bandcamp.

The findings are going to be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters today.