NASA Shares 'Screaming Eye' Sounds From Eerie Depths Of The Universe

With all the years of astronomical research, the universe has enthralled generations of humans, left awestruck by the magnitude of its wonders.?

Helix Nebula (Image: Reuters/ NASA)

From what has been observed, humans have mostly used vision as the one-true perception of the universe. What if this was to be changed and we were to listen to the sound of the universe instead?

This is what NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Center (CXC) promises to do with its ‘sonification’ project. Modern technology enables us to convert data points into audio, thus creating a sound that essentially describes the observation. Previously, such data points were only converted in images of the recorded universe that we used to look at.

Interestingly enough, the sounds generated by such methods have turned out to be equally thrilling as the images of the universe. One such amazing but terrifying sound was recently shared by the US space agency NASA on NASA Hubble’s Instagram profile.

The agency made public a sonification of a planetary nebula captured by the Hubble telescope. In the caption, it explained, “the Helix Nebula is 655 light-years away from us, and 3 light-years across! Near the end of a Sun-like star’s life, nebulae like this form when the star sheds some of its outer material.”

Check out the eerie sound, seemingly straight out of a horror movie, in the video below:

NASA explains the method by which its team was able to represent the nebula with this audio. In the caption, it said - “red light is assigned lower pitches and blue light is assigned higher pitches. Just as the frequencies of light increase from red to blue, frequencies of sound increase from low to high pitches.”

Note that there is no sound in space on its own simply because of the vacuum, leaving no medium for sound to travel through. It is through sonification that scientists can “conceptualize the data in astronomical images in a new, auditory way,” explains NASA.

This is not the first sound developed through the project. The space agency earlier shared a more melodious and captivating audio generated by mapping the center of the Milky Way. Check out the sound in the video below: