Cosmic concrete may one day be used on a distant star, but NASA has already transformed cosmic space telescope images into sonifications to let you hear them. Put simply, this project takes digital data captured by NASA telescopes and translates them into musical notes and sounds so they can be heard rather than seen.
Each layer of sound that you hear represents particular wavelengths of light detected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble Space Telescope, and Spitzer Space Telescope in multiple combinations. In the sonification above, we hear the system called R Aquarii, which contains two stars — a white dwarf and a red giant — in orbit around each other.
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Messier 104 (M104 for short), located about 28 million light-years from Earth, is one of the largest galaxies in the nearby Virgo cluster. As seen from Earth, the galaxy is angled nearly edge-on allowing a view of its bright core and spiral arms wrapped around it. Spitzer’s infrared view of M104 shows a ring of dust circling the galaxy that pierces through the obscuring dust in Hubble’s optical light image,” said NASA.
