Ever wonder what a black hole looks like? Well, if we’re going to be honest, it looks like it grows like spaghetti and death, which are not really nice things. Understanding our pain, however, NASA comes up with the latest installments of its sonification series, helping us to hear a place, but in a pleasant way.
You may be wondering what sonification is; in fact, it is a process by which NASA converts celestial data in the form of images into sounds. The data comes from NASA telescopes, such as the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Such images are processed into sounds using an algorithm that does not, in essence, alter the original content of this data in any way. You could think of it as listening to an audiobook instead of reading it on your own.
The results are very pleasing, and surprisingly impressive.
You will hear a place here
The first is the specification of an image of the Chandra Deep Field South space region. The image itself is unique in that it is “the deepest image ever taken in X-rays” according to NASA, and represents “more than seven million seconds of Chandra’s observation time”.
The colorful dots that can look like stars here are, of course, individual galaxies and black holes – mostly supermassive ones. The colors of these individual dots determine the extracted tone as the bar moves across the image from the bottom to the top. White light in the image is reproduced as white sound, and the music frequencies you hear are provided by different X-ray frequencies captured in the image. In the image you see, these had to be very tight but are shown in red, green and blue for low, medium and full energy X-rays, respectively. However, keep in mind that the sound you hear recreates the whole spectrum, unparalleled. Finally, the position of the sound set tells you whether the source of the emitted light lies to the left or right of the image.
Next, Nebula Eye of the Cat. This was created by a star slowly running out of atomic fuel (helium), which emits a lot of gas and dust. These create amazing clouds that lie around the star.
The image used here included both X-ray data around the center, recorded by Chandra, and visible light data from the Hubble Space Telescope, mostly aimed at the structures destroyed by the star.
Instead of a bar scanning the image from bottom to top, here NASA uses a clockwise scan – it looks very similar to those radar lines you would see in 90s action movies. When this line comes across a light, a pitch is taken out: the farther from the center it is, the higher the pitch. Brighter lights are also louder. X-ray data is reproduced in harder notes while visible lights feel more relaxed.
It is very soft.
The last installment in the NASA Messier 51 sonification gallery, also known as the Whirlpool Galaxy, is a spinning galaxy very similar to our own.
The sonification moves radically from the top of the image in a clockwise motion. This time, the radius of the galaxy produces different notes on a small scale. All types of light (infrared, optical, ultraviolet, and X-ray) are represented here. The sound… is very strange. Pleasant, but eerie. A steady, low hum is produced by the bright heart of the galaxy, while other light sources in its diameter produce short, moving sounds that almost sound sensible. I like this one the most out of the three, it’s just full of personality.
These three sonification projects were led by Dr. Kimberly Arcand, a vision scientist at the Chandra X-ray Center (CXC), with psychologist Dr. Matt Russo and musician Andrew Santaguida (both of the SYSTEM Sound project).
If you like these as much as I did, you’ll be thrilled to hear that NASA has a complete gallery of sonification projects that you can browse through, and listen to them all here.