The core of our Milky Way galaxy is densely packed with gas, dust, stars, and stellar remnants, but its centerpiece is a monster black hole with a mass of 4 million Suns called Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A-star”).

This sonification tracks an image of the galactic center captured by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope, and Spitzer Space Telescope in X-ray, optical, and infrared light, respectively. A different instrument represents each observatory, with a xylophone for Chandra, a violin for Hubble and a soft piano for Spitzer. The translation begins on the left side of the image and moves to the right, with sounds representing the positions and brightness of the sources. The light of objects located toward the top of the image have higher pitch, while the intensity of the light controls the volume. Stars and compact sources emerge as individual notes, while extended clouds of gas and dust produce an evolving drone. A crescendo happens in the brightest region of the image, where the supermassive black hole resides. The Hubble image outlines energetic regions where stars are being born, while Spitzer’s infrared data show glowing clouds of dust containing complex structures. X-rays from Chandra reveal gas heated to millions of degrees from stellar explosions and outflows from Sagittarius A*. 

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: NASA/STScI; IR: Spitzer NASA/JPL-Caltech; Sonification: NASA/CXC/SAO/Kimberly Arcand, SYSTEM Sounds (Matt Russo, Andrew Santaguida)

Galactic Center Sonification

Watching Dead Empires in Decay’, an album recorded under another of Kirby’s pseudonyms ‘The Stranger’ and released on Modern Love, a label that has been close to Kirby through these last eventful 15 years. It’s a dream album for the label: perhaps the most ambitious of Kirby’s career so far. It’s complex, singular, enigmatic, percussive, dark, and you just can’t work out how it was constructed.

Gone are the sampled 78’s of The Caretaker, but it also doesn't exactly sound electronic - you just can’t quite fathom how any of it was put together: Field Recordings? Found Sounds? Sheets of metal scraped and hammered? Drum machines re-wired? It’s stark and unsettling, haunted, even troubling - but often just beautiful.

The Stranger - Spiral Of Decline

Stardust: Passing Comet Tempel 1

liquid brain wonder

Plasmaspheric hiss waves as heard by NASA’s Polar mission as it passed around Earth.

Credits: NASA/University of Iowa

Plasmaspheric Hiss

This recording was produced by converting into audible sounds some of the radar echoes received by Huygens during the last few kilometers of its descent onto Saturn's moon Titan. As the probe approaches the ground, both the pitch and intensity increase. Scientists will use intensity of the echoes to speculate about the nature of the surface.
Credit: ESA/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Radar Echoes From Titan's Surface

One year and three trips around the Sun later, NASA's Parker Solar Probe heard some weird, sci-fi sounds from plasma within the solar wind -- and those sounds may answer unanswered questions about how the wind forms.

Parker Solar Probe - Whistler Mode Waves 1

Parker Solar Probe - Langmuir Waves

Parker Solar Probe - Dust Impacts

Bradley Strider - Bradley's Beat Part 2

Original space audio recordings provided courtesy of NASA and The University of Iowa. https://space-audio.org/

Voyager 1: Plasma Waves of the Bow Shock of Jupiter

Hello, we’re NASA. You may have seen our astronauts, rocket launches, or Mars rovers — but have you heard our sounds? From interviews with astronauts and engineers to stories that take you on a tour of the galaxy, NASA’s audio offerings let you experience the thrill of space exploration without ever leaving Earth.