NASA just added three more ultrasound projects to their site and I couldn’t be happier

Have you ever wondered what a black hole sounds like? Well, if we’re being honest it probably sounds like we’re going to spaghetti and death, which are not very nice things. NASA understands our pain and is bringing the latest installments in their sonification series that will help us hear space, but in a pleasant way.

Photo credit Marshall Space Flight Center / Flickr by NASA.

You may be wondering what public address is. In essence, it is a process by which NASA converts astronomical data in the form of images into sounds. The data comes from NASA telescopes such as the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Such images are then processed into sounds using an algorithm that does not alter the original content of this data in any way. You can imagine listening to an audiobook instead of reading it yourself.

The results are very gratifying and surprisingly impressive.

There is space to be heard in it

The first is a sound reinforcement of an image of the Chandra Deep Field South region of space. The image itself is noteworthy because, according to NASA, it is “the deepest image ever taken in X-rays” and represents “over seven million seconds of Chandra observation time.”

The colored dots that might appear like stars here are in fact individual galaxies and black holes – mostly supermassive. The colors of these individual points determine the tone that is produced when the bar moves from bottom to top in the image. White light in the picture is restored as white noise, and the music frequencies you hear are indicated by different X-ray frequencies recorded in the photo. In the image you see these had to be heavily compressed, but for low, medium and high energy x-rays they are shown in red, green and blue. Note, however, that the sound you hear recovers the entire uncompressed spectrum. Finally, the better position of the sound shows whether the light source to be exposed to sound is to the left or right of the image.

Next up is the Cat’s Eye Nebula. This was formed by a star that is slowly running out of atomic fuel (helium), causing it to emit huge amounts of gas and dust. These form spectacular clouds that linger 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 focused on the structures ejected by the star.

Instead of a bar that scans the image from the bottom up, NASA uses a clockwise scan here – it looks a lot like the radar lines you’d see in ’90s action films. When this line hits light, a pitch is created: the further it is from the center, the higher the pitch. Brighter lights are louder too. X-ray data is rendered in harder notes, while visible light sounds softer.

It’s a very haunting melody.

The final release on NASA’s sonification gallery is Messier 51, also known as Whirlpool Galaxy, a spiral galaxy very similar to ours.

The sound moves clockwise radially from the top of the image. This time the radius of the galaxy creates different notes on a small scale. Every type of light (infrared, optical, ultraviolet, and X-ray) is shown here. The sound is … very scary. Pleasant but scary. The galaxy’s bright core produces a constant, low-level hum, while other light sources along its diameter produce short, noticeable noises that sound almost coherent. I like this one the most of all three, it’s just full of personality.

These three ultrasound projects were carried out by Dr. Kimberly Arcand, a visualization scientist at the Chandra X-ray Center (CXC), with astrophysicist Dr. Matt Russo and musician Andrew Santaguida (both from the SYSTEM Sound project).

If you enjoyed these as much as I did, you’ll be delighted to hear that NASA has a whole gallery of public address projects that you can browse and listen to all here.