As the rocket industry gears up for more launches, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is busy turning light into sound. NASA has several telescopes that enable it to see billions of light years away, and astronomers are busy scanning the skies each day to understand the universe. Now, the space agency, bolstered by the new James Webb telescope, has started to convert the light data from the different telescopes into sound to understand the structures of the galaxies better and stars it studies. These sounds depend on the characteristics of the objects being studied, and often they represent a combined set of data from multiple telescopes.
NASA Converts Remarkable Data From Different Galaxies & Star Systems Into Sound
The space agency shared three sets of sonifications that represent light data captured from distant galaxies and star systems. These range from a collection of multiple galaxies moving around each other to stars held in each other's vicinity due to their gravitational attraction. The systems and galaxies subject to the light-to-sound conversion are the Messier 104 galaxy (also known as the Sombrero Galaxy) and the Stephan's Quintet and R Aquarii star systems.
Out of the three, the quintet is the farthest away from Earth, located at least 210 million light years away from Earth. Stephan's Quintet consists of four galaxies proper that are linked due to each other's gravity, and a fifth is actually quite near to Earth, with an approximate distance of 39 million light years.
Conversely, R Aquarii is the closest to Earth, located just 652 light years away. In the cosmic scale of things, where NASA has studied objects billions of light years away from Earth, it's practically a neighboring collection of stars. R Aquarii is made of two stars, one a red dwarf and the other a white dwarf. Held together in orbit, they provide some spectacular visuals when the white star pulls some of the material from the red giant to its surface, leading to colorful explosions.
The light from the galaxies and start systems is regularly captured by Spitzer Space Telescope, the brand new James Webb Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the well known Hubble Space Telescope. Their inputs are often combined to create composite images; now, these have been converted into sound.
These sonifications vary with the brightness of the light and the distance of the observer from the center of the objects. These lead to the sound varying in volume and pitch as the cursor covers the image set, with the volume and pitch rising as the light intensifies or the image becomes denser.
These conversions also enable a deeper understanding of the mechanics of light travel from the galaxies. For instance, emissions from the Sombrero's center travel as far as sixty thousand light years for a galaxy that itself is fifty thousand light years wide. Additionally, for this particular galaxy, NASA composed three different sonnets for visuals from Chandra, Spitzer and Hubble. According to NASA, the "X-rays from Chandra sound like a synthesizer, Spitzer’s infrared data are strings, and optical light from Hubble has bell-like tones."
You can 'listen' to R Aquarii's song in the video below. For the others, NASA has shared all the links here.
Refference- https://wccftech.com
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