Space isn't silent. In fact, it's a fairly noisy place ... you just have to know where to tune in. Yesterday's discovery of gravitational waves completed the picture of Einstein's theory of relativity by finding distortions in space-time. But the event happened 1.3 billion years ago, and though the black holes were large, they still weren't seen visually. There were "heard" through the radio waves given off by the cosmic collision of two massive black holes.
Though radio astronomers shy away from the word "listening," converting the black hole collissions into sounds still yielded a pretty impressive sound. Here is what you'd hear if you tuned a radio to the right frequency and eavesdropped on two massive gravity wells combining into one. It's a haunting sound, with a menace lurking beneath it. Listen in: this is the sound of our understanding of science changing.