A mesmerising video has been released on the official Instagram account of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Hubble. In the video, we can hear the sonification of Supernova 1987A which was done using the observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA Chandra X-ray Observatory.
We can see the dense ring of the gas glowing brighter in the video as the supernova shock wave passes through it. This ring was ejected by the star before it went supernova. In the sonification done by Systems Sound, brighter light is assigned louder and higher notes.
The video is a time-lapse and takes us through the observations made by the sophisticated tools from 1999 to 2013. The calming tune has attracted the attention of many space enthusiasts.
It has been viewed over 3 lakh times after it was posted a day ago. A person said that the music sounds like Pink Floyd which is an English rock band.
Many reacted with heart eyes emojis to the video while several commented ‘wow’ after watching the fascinating video. An Instagram user named Deependra commented ‘magnificent’ in the comments section. Ty Lee, another commented, “That’s amazing.”
Several space enthusiasts also had questions about the supernova. A user asked about the timing of the supernova and he was interested in knowing when the phenomena happened, not when humans got to see it. In response to his comment, another user replied that it happened around 187,000 years ago.
Supernova 1987A also known as SN 1987A is a type II supernova. This supernova was in a dwarf satellite of the Milky Way called Large Magellanic Cloud. It occurred at a distance of 1,68,000 light-years from Earth. It is also the closest supernova since Kepler's Supernova. The light from this supernova reached Earth on February 23, 1987.
Previously, NASA Hubble released the sonification of many other celestial objects. In October last year, NASA released a video where the sound of an image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope could be heard. In the tweet, NASA had said that assigning pitches to the stars and galaxies provides them with a new way to conceptualise data though there is no sound in space.
https://www.news18.com/news/buzz/what-does-space-sound-like-nasa-is-using-sonification-techniques-to-render-it-2963327.html
Earlier in January, NASA Hubble had shared a video with the sonification of the Bullet Cluster. In the caption, NASA Hubble said that each layer of the data was limited to a specific frequency range. Data representing the dark matter was assigned lowest frequencies while that of X-Ray was given the highest frequencies. Watch the video of Bullet Cluster’s sonification here:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CJtTYq1lIb9/