In Stephan’s Quintet, four galaxies move around each other, held togetherīy gravity, while a fifth galaxy sits in the frame but is actually at a much different distance. Your browser does not support the video tag. The ribbon-like arcs captured by Hubble create a rising and falling melody that sounds similar to a set of singing bowls (metal bowls that produce different sounds and tones when struck with a mallet), while the Chandra data are rendered to sound more like a synthetic and windy purr.
Listeners can hear jets from the white dwarf as the cursor travels near the two o’clock and eight o’clock positions. The deep thuds toward the four corners are “diffraction spikes,” which are artifacts from the bright central star. The volume changes in proportion to the brightness of sources in Hubble’s visible light and Chandra’s X-ray image, while the distance from the center dictates the musical pitch (higher notes are farther out). In the sonification of R Aquarii, the piece evolves as a radar-like scan of the image, clockwise starting at the 12 o’clock position. X-rays from Chandra show a jet from the white dwarf banging into the material surrounding it and creating shock waves. In a composite visual image, Hubble data (red and blue) reveal spectacular structures that are evidence of outbursts generated by the pair of stars buried at the center of the image.
The system called R Aquarii contains two stars - a white dwarf and a red giant - in orbit around each other. Each layer of sound in these sonifications 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 various combinations. This project takes the digital data captured by its telescopes in space - most of which is invisible to our unaided eyes - and translates them into musical notes and sounds so they can be heard rather than seen. In the past few years, NASA has been producing “sonifications” of astronomical data of objects in space. This is similar in some ways to how different notes of the musical scale can be played together to create harmonies that are impossible with single notes alone. Because different telescopes can detect different types of light, each brings its own pieces of information to whatever is being observed. Astronomers often look at objects in space through multiple telescopes.
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