[imagesource:youtube/nasamarshallspaceflightcenter]

Because there’s no air in space to act as a medium, sound cannot travel up there.

But that hasn’t stopped NASA from producing musical tones from the same telescope data that shows us such stunning pictures of deep space so that we can hear the beauty of the universe.

AKA the data from the agency’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Hubble Space Telescope, and the now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope has been given the Hollywood treatment, per Space:

“The visualization team started with the scientific observations from the various telescopes, and then applied some of the same software that Hollywood uses in their feature films to the data,” Frank Summers, who is a visualization scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland, said in a statement.

“Astronomy has always been very visual, but there’s no reason why we have to represent the data through that manner alone,” Kimberly Arcand, who is a visualization scientist at the Chandra X-ray Center in Massachusetts, said in the same statement. “This type of depiction is taking the scientific story of Stephan’s Quintet — the deep, dense, and beautiful dataset — and translating it into an auditory experience.”

In the galaxies of Stephan’s Quintet in the Pegasus constellation, four galaxies move around each other, held together by gravity at about 290 million light-years away, while a fifth galaxy sits in the frame but is actually at a much different distance, roughly 39 million light-years away.

Glide along with the horizontal line that combs through the galaxy group and reveals where the sounds are coming from in NASA’a newly released video:

A sonification of these data begins at the top and scans the image downward. As the cursor moves, the pitch changes in relationship to the brightness in different ways. The background galaxies and foreground stars in the visual images Webb detects are mapped to different notes on a synthetic glass marimba. Meanwhile, stars with diffraction spikes are played as crash cymbals. The galaxies of Stephan’s Quintet themselves are heard as smoothly changing frequencies as the scan passes over them. The X-rays from Chandra, which reveal a shock wave that has superheated gas to tens of millions of degrees, are represented by a synthetic string sound.

NASA has released other musical space bodies as part of its ongoing project to convert telescope data into audio experiences, including a musical piece on R Aquarii, which is a binary star system of a dim white dwarf and a pulsating red giant about 650 light-years from Earth:

Here’s NASA’s description of what you just heard:

At two o’clock and eight o’clock positions, you can hear a strong wind, which reflects a jet of ionized matter blasting out of the white dwarf and slamming into surrounding stellar material. Hubble’s data, which are visualized as “ribbon-like arcs” in the image, can be heard as soothing sounds like those that resonate from Tibetan singing bowls while Chandra’s data are represented as a “windy purr.”

Meanwhile, the soundtrack of Messier 104 (or M104) – a giant galaxy in the Virgo cluster about 28 million light-years away – is more like a whistle that shrills and mellows according to the brightness of the sources:

Not only does the sonification of space help visually impaired people, but scientists say that translating data into sounds can help people process the information in different ways and bring to light certain aspects of data that were not noticed previously.

I’m just glad to have a true-to-form soundtrack to life, finally.

[source:space&nasa]