NASA Turned Light From Nearby Galaxies Into Music, And You Can Listen To Our Vast Universe
Back in August last year, NASA captured this image of a cluster of galaxies with the Hubble telescope. It¡¯s a pretty spectacular picture on its own, but this month NASA ¡°sonified¡± the visualization, and the result is some spooky space music.
Back in August last year, NASA captured this image of a cluster of galaxies with the Hubble telescope.
It's a pretty spectacular picture on its own, but this month NASA "sonified" the visualization, and the result is some spooky space music straight out of Alien.
NASA
The image was captured using the Hubble Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3. In it, you can see the spiral arms in various colours, and the smudges across the sky with thousands of stars.
NASA then decided to codify the image as sound. Tim flows from left to right, and the frequency of the sound playing changes from bottom to top, ranging from 30 Hz to 1,000 Hz. The features at the bottom play lower notes, with those at the top playing higher ones. The bright stars and densely packed galaxies provide for short sharp notes, while the more expansive ones make longer notes.
This might be the most unusual type of music you hear anywhere. Click to hear what happens when we translate the light captured in this gorgeous @NASAHubble image of a galaxy cluster¡ into sound! ??https://t.co/XWjexvMGvg pic.twitter.com/xllp9jr1jx
¡ª NASA Blueshift (@NASAblueshift) March 4, 2019
It's pretty great to listen to, not to mention it's a cool experiment. Now it makes me wonder what sonifying the Earth's terrain via satellite map would sound like.
