For July 4, NASA unveils an astronomical fireworks show, complete with sound effects

NASA is lighting the cosmos in red, white and blue in honor of the 250^th birthday of the United States—and the show even comes with sound.

The imagery shows the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, the dusty nebula NGC 3603, the spiral galaxy Messier 94 and the galaxy cluster ZwCl 0024+1652. Data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based telescopes is portrayed in a patriotic color scheme.

Making this cosmic fireworks display not only visual, but auditory, optical data from three of the images was matched with the sounds of different instruments in a process called sonification.

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Cassiopeia A, the only silent image of the new July 4 series, is a supernova remnant 11,000 light-years from Earth. It’s a true cosmic firecracker, a blown-apart star with a blast wave still visible in X-ray emissions. Here, that explosion is shown in blue from Chandra’s observations. Red and white infrared data from the James Webb space telescope shows the expanding stellar material from the explosion in red and white.

Meanwhile, the nebula NGC 3603 looks like a chrysanthemum firework burst in bright red. This star-forming region sits 20,000 light-years away from Earth. NASA scientists sonified the image of NGC 3603 by assigning different elements of the image to a sound. For example, neutron stars and black holes register as piano notes, while Hubble optical imagery becomes the gentle strum of an acoustic guitar. The background hum comes from X-ray emissions detected by Chandra.

In the image of Messier 94, a spiral galaxy that’s also known as NGC 4736, Chandra’s X-ray data becomes a whistling wind while dense features such as neutron stars and stellar-mass black holes ring in crystalline tones from a glass marimba. Piano notes ring out to represent stars and far-off galaxies. This stunning galaxy is 16 million light-years away from Earth, but is so bright that it can be spotted with a good commercial telescope (although not in red, white and blue, as seen here).

Messier 94’s distance is nothing compared to the trip it would take to get to galaxy cluster ZwCl 0024+1652, which is 5 thousand million light-years from our solar system. This galaxy cluster is known for its unique dark-matter structure, which formed in a collision between two separate galaxy clusters. While dark matter structures often follow the contours of visible matter such as gas and stars, the ring of dark matter at ZwCl 0024+1652 stands apart. Here, it’s seen in Hubble data in brilliant blue. A synthesized sci-fi sound highlights the oddball nature of ZwCl 0024+1652, with the music peaking at the dark-matter ring and again at the cluster’s core of superheated gas. Piano notes highlight background galaxies, while background stars ping as notes on a glockenspiel.

NASA’s sonification program began in 2020 to translate astronomical data into frequencies that can be heard by the human ear. It’s part of an attempt to bring outreach to blind and low-vision individuals, but also offers sighted people a chance to explore the universe with a new sense. There’s even a tool allowing anyone to convert space visuals into sound, creating their own song of the cosmos.

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