Enjoy the gentle rhythm of deep space galaxies and stars whose data has been “sonoked” in orchestral music.
Sound cannot travel through space, thanks to the lack of air to act as a medium. Instead, NASA has produced musical tones from the same telescope data that are reflected in the images so that you can now hear the beauty of space.
“The visualization team started with scientific observations from various telescopes, and then applied some of the same software that Hollywood uses in their feature films to the data,” Frank Summers, a visualization scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland, said in a statement. statement.
A newly released 30-second video guides you through the five galaxies Stephen Quintet In the constellation of Pegasus, four of them are gravitationally bound together by about 290 million light years far away while the fifth is an innocent spectator about 39 million light-years away.
Related: Sounds in Space: What noises do planets make?
The new video is still except for a white horizontal line that runs through the cluster of galaxies and reveals where the sounds are coming from. Each of the five galaxies lets out a big whoosh as the foreground stars rock the warm, soft tones of a xylophone-like instrument called a glass marimba. The piece is also sprinkled with the higher notes of a stringed instrument, which are bolts around a star in telescope images that form when starlight bends around NASA’s hexagonal mirrors. James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
“Astronomy has always been very visual, but there is no reason why data should be represented in this way alone,” said Kimberly Arcand, a visualization scientist at the Chandra X-ray Center in Massachusetts. statement. “This kind of imaging takes the scientific story of Stefan’s Quintet—the deep, dense, beautiful set of data—and translates it into an auditory experience.”
As part of an ongoing project to convert telescope data into audio experiments, NASA has also released sonifications of two other celestial targets by integrating data from the agency. Chandra X-ray ObservatoryJWST Hubble Space TelescopeAnd now retired Spitzer Space Telescope.
The piece is on R Aquarii, which is an A.I binary star system from dim white dwarf And a pulsating red giant at a distance of about 650 light years from Earth, which increases in size in proportion to the brightness of the sources and their distance from the center.
At two o’clock and eight o’clock, you can hear strong winds reflecting off a jet of ionized matter shooting off the white dwarf and crashing into surrounding stellar material. The Hubble data, visualized as “ribbon-like arcs” in the image, can be heard as soothing sounds like those reverberating from Tibetan singing bowls while the Chandra data is represented as “stormy purring,” NASA representatives wrote in Image description Posted Tuesday (June 20).
Messier 104 (or M104) – a giant galaxy in the Virgo cluster about 28 million light-years away, looks more like a whistle that vibrates and merges according to the brightness of the sources.
Scientists say that translating data into sounds can help people process information in different ways and highlight certain aspects of data that weren’t noticed before. Such audio data makes the beauty of the universe accessible to visually impaired space lovers.
“Sonifications provide a sensory way for me to experience the magnitude and power of astronomical phenomena,” Christine Malik, a member of the blind and visually impaired community that supports NASA’s Sonifications project, said in the same statement. “It is an invitation for blind and visually impaired people to listen, enjoy, and then read deeper to understand exactly what is being heard.”
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