“Cosmic Harmonies: Sonifications from NASA Telescopes” might sound at first read a little, well, spacey. But a few minutes listening and looking can give us a very different perspective on what’s out there. And it can also allow people with visual impairments to experience “the wonders of the universe and what our telescopes are revealing,” according to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.

Astronomers use several kinds of space telescopes to study the galaxies. Each “sees” or detects different kinds of light – X-ray, infrared and optical – and NASA in “Cosmic Harmonies” mapped each of those data sets and matched them to different types of sound.

The sonifications were led by the Chandra X-ray Center as part of NASA’s “Universe of Learning” program. Marshall manages the Chandra telescope program that celebrates its 25th anniversary next year. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra-X Center controls Chandra’s science and flight operations. Read more about the project here, and here’s more about each sonification:

R Aquarii

The space system called R Aquarii has two stars – a white dwarf and a red giant – in orbit around each other. Data from the Hubble telescope (in red and blue) put into composite images show the “outbursts” from the system’s center stars and the X-rays from Chandra show a jet from the white dwarf. The piece is like a clockwise radar scan and the volume changes in proportion to brightness.

Stephan’s Quintet

Four galaxies are moving around each other in Stephen’s Quintet held together by gravity. A fifth galaxy is in the picture but is actually far away from the other four. The image here is made as infrared light from the James Webb Space Telescope (red, orange, yellow , green and blue) with additional data from the Spitzer Space Telescope (red, green, and blue) and X-ray light from Chandra (light blue). As the cursor moves, the pitch changes. The X-rays from Chandra, which reveal a shock wave that has superheated gas, are represented by a synthetic string sound.

M104

Messier 104 is 28 million light-years from Earth and one of the largest “nearby” galaxies in the Virgo cluster. Spitzer’s infrared image shows a ring of dust around the galaxy and a hidden disc of stars in the dusty ring. The X-rays from Chandra sound like a synthesizer, Spitzer’s infrared data are the strings, and optical light from Hubble has bell-like tones.

Sonification isn’t confined to Chandra. Last week, a story about Marshall-led IXPE telescope featured the process. It used data from Chandra and IXPE to help researchers determine that X-ray light found in the black hole of the Milky Way galaxy’s molecular clouds originated 200 years ago in an outburst of a star, Marshall public affairs officer Jonathan Deal said. That means what NASA had called the “ancient sleeping giant “ actually woke up fairly recently by cosmic standards (200 years ago) to start devouring gas and other matter in its reach.