The ever-mysterious and fascinating space never fails to surprise us mere humans and a recent post by American space agency National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has done it yet again. On Monday, NASA shared a sonification of a planetary nebula captured by the Hubble telescope.
In its caption, the space agency explained, the Helix Nebula is 655 light-years away from the earth, and three light-years across. The eerie sound that is heard in the post comes from the dying sun-like star’s life. Nebulae like this form when the star sheds some of its outer material.
In the sonification, the red part is assigned lower pitches and blue light or the part of the eye is assigned higher pitches. When the frequencies of light increase from red to blue, frequencies of sound increase from low to high pitches. NASA said that while there is no sound in space because of vacuum, sonifications like the one captured by the Hubble Space Telescope help in conceptualizing the data in astronomical images in a new auditory way.
The audio has received 651,248 views. Netizens have expressed mixed reactions to the sound. Some are terrified while some are fascinated. As one user commented, “The eye part scared me sm. I was caught off guard by the sound of a screaming woman. (sic)”
“It sounds like screaming,” said another, while some called it a sound of hell, “If it was 666 light years away I would say it comes from hell.” It was a fascinating sound for Star Trek fans, as one commented, “That sounds like sound effects from the original Star Trek.”
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is known for sharing such fascinating posts on Instagram. In its recent post, it shared a time-lapse sequence of Hubble images showing a Comet ISON moving against a backdrop of stars in May 2013, as it was hurtling toward the Sun at 48,000 miles per hour.