NASA voiced a spiral galaxy
Miscellaneous / / May 31, 2022
The sounds of space, though not quite real.
In the constellation Eridanus, 69 million light-years from Earth, is NGC 1300, a barred spiral galaxy. It is not as perfect as NGC 3631, which Hubble photographed recent, but also beautiful: her sleeves are laced with young blue stars, star-forming clouds resembling pink cotton candy, and dark dust lanes.
And if, thanks to Hubble, we know how it looks, it is not possible to know how it sounds. But scientists from NASA decided to take the sound from the image itself - or rather, sonify the data in a different spectrum, on the basis of which a color photograph was created.
To do this, scientists distributed the pitch and volume in accordance with the brightness of objects, their distance from the center of the galaxy, and other parameters. The brighter the light, the louder the sound; the farther the light is from the center, the higher its tone.
It is worth noting that we are talking about data manipulation, and not real sounds of space. Some popularizers of science, including Neil deGrasse Tyson, are negative about such experiments because they can lead to misleading people who don't read press releases and just turn on the video, thinking that this is what space sounds like: NASA published it, in at the end.
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