Janna Levin, professor of physics and astronomy at Columbia University and author of Black Hole Blues, describes the noise that black holes make this way: “You could say black holes are playing drums out there. Space-time is the drum, and black holes are the mallets.” The collision of two black holes, 30 times the mass of the sun and 1.3 light-years away, was captured by LIGO as a loud chirp.