NASA releases galaxy sonification to show cosmic sights can be heard

United States – NASA : Sound recordings from space were released by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. According to the American space agency, we can still explore the center of our Milky Way galaxy even if its  too distant for us to visit in person.

Hubble has released cosmic sights that can be experienced with other senses as well. Astronomers create visual representations that would otherwise be invisible to us by translating the inherently digital data (in the form of ones and zeroes) captured by telescopes in space into images.

Hubble now allows us to see what the Galactic Center looks like in different types of light. NASA said, through data sonification, the same digital data that gets translated into images is transformed into sound.

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NASA said, “elements of the image, like brightness and position, are assigned pitches and volumes,”, and adding, “each translation below begins on the left side of the image and moves to the right”

Explaining the sound recordings, the space agency said the sonification’s provide a new way of experiencing and conceptualizing data.

“Sonification’s allow the audience, including blind and visually impaired communities, to listen to astronomical images and explore their data,” it said.

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NASA said that the Chandra X-ray Observatory team combined their observations with those from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope to create these sonification’s.

Sonification is the process that translates data into sound, and a new project brings the center of the Milky Way to listeners for the first time. Stars and compact sources are converted to individual notes while extended clouds of gas and dust produce an evolving drone.

Users can listen to data from this region, roughly 400 light years across, either  together as an ensemble in which NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope, and Spitzer Space Telescope, each telescope plays a different instrument or  as “solos”.