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The Universe is a wonderful place, filled with a large number of planets to explore, unsolved mysteries, and even ‘super bubbles’ blown by black holes.
But there is one thing that space really is not: noisy. Without Earth’s air molecules that help you listen, out there in space you would be listening to a lot of silence.
Fortunately, that didn’t stop NASA from discovering a way to produce sound by soundproofing space in 2019, by ‘sonifying’ the image above taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Yes, move on to music, podcasts, or audiobooks – the new thing to hear is Hubble footage.
The image NASA used for this project was taken by the Hubble Advanced Survey Camera and Wide Field Camera 3 in August 2018.
The guys who work with Hubble call the image a ‘galactic treasure chest’ because of the number of galaxies dotted around it.
“Every visible particle in a galaxy is home to countless stars,” NASA explained of the image.
“Some stars closer to home shine brightly in the foreground, while a huge cluster of galaxies is at the center of the image; an immense collection of perhaps thousands of galaxies, all united by the unrelenting force of gravity.”
But as beautiful as this image is, it has just reached a new level, once transformed into an astonishingly mysterious musical composition.
The team that created the sonified image explains that different locations and image elements produce different sounds.
Stars and compact galaxies are represented by short, clear sounds, while spiral galaxies emit more complex and longer notes.
“Time flows from left to right, and the frequency of the sound changes from bottom to top, from 30 to 1,000 hertz,” NASA explained in the comments accompanying the video.
“Objects near the bottom of the image produce lower notes, while objects near the top produce higher notes.”
And while it may sound a little creepy at first, the ‘sounds’ in this image create a pretty beautiful melody, especially near the middle, when the sound reaches a cluster of galaxies called RXC J0142.9 + 4438.
“The higher density of galaxies near the center of the image,” the team explained, “results in a wave of midrange tones midway through the video.”
So there you have it: a whole new way to enjoy the Universe.
A version of this article was first published in March 2019.
