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What Does The Milky Way Sound Like?

A collaboration between NASA and musicians has transformed a photograph of the Milky Way into a musical rendering after they matched the wavelengths of light to wavelengths of sound in order to reveal our galaxy in a whole different light, or rather, a musical one.


Milky Way
Credit: X-ray: NASA / CXC / SAO; Optical: NASA / STScI; IR: Spitzer NASA / JPL-Caltech

Kimberly Arcand, an expert in astronomy visualization at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, got together with several musicians to create a musical guide to interpreting the contents of the photograph. The result may be described as a Milky Way Symphony (feat. Supermassive Black Hole).


It’s important to note that if you plunged a microphone into the middle of the Milky Way and listened to the sounds, there wouldn’t be any music. These sounds are clever auditory matches of the visual wavelengths picked up by the telescope.


But the result is really rather beautiful and mesmerising...



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