Despite the fact that space is a very silent, mysterious and fascinating place, NASA scientists have decided to translate an image from the Hubble Space Telescope into sound, into music. The photograph in question, filled with galaxies, was taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera in August 2018.
It was in 2019 when NASA discovered a way to produce sound in the soundproofing of space and scientists working with Hubble used the image dubbed the ‘galactic treasure chest’ due to the number of galaxies dotted in it as a canvas on which work your particular piece of music.
“Galaxies abound in this spectacular Hubble image; the spiral arms rotate in all colors and orientations, and diffuse elliptical speckles can be seen in the frame as softly bright spots in the sky,” NASA explained about the image.
“Every visible particle in a galaxy is home to countless stars. Some of the nearest stars glow brightly in the foreground, while we can find a huge cluster of galaxies in the center of the image – an immense collection of perhaps thousands of galaxies, all linked together by the relentless force of gravity. “
If this image is already fabulous, NASA has gone one step further by transforming it into an astonishingly creepy musical composition. This image showing the wonders of the universe shows 41 star clusters , each containing billions of stars.
How is an image translated into sound?
NASA scientists applied a different frequency to each object in the image . Entities at the top of the image have a higher frequency and those at the bottom have a lower frequency. Thus, the sonified image shows that the different locations and elements of the image produce different sounds: stars and compact galaxies are represented by short and clear sounds, while spiral galaxies emit more complex and long notes. The result is almost exactly what we would expect deep space to sound like, even though, as we’ve recalled, there is no sound in space.
“Space is ‘sonified’ in this visualization of a group of galaxies imaged by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Time flows from left to right, and the frequency of sound changes from bottom to top, from 30 to 1,000 Hertz.” , clarifies NASA.
How does this music sound ? A bit creepy, it all has to be said, at least for the first few seconds. Once you get used to it, the ‘sounds’ in the Hubble telescope photo create a admittedly pretty melody, especially near the middle, when the sound reaches a galaxy cluster called RXC J0142.9 + 4438 that produces a lot of tones. mid-range.
“The higher density of galaxies near the center of the image results in a surge of mid-range tones in the middle of the video,” explained NASA.
Reference: NASA / Hubble
