00:02visit chandra's beautiful universe planetary sonification
00:11in late february people in the northern hemisphere can look up for a special sight
00:15six planets will all be visible from clear and dark night skies since the planets in our solar
00:22system travel around the sun in the same plane known as the ecliptic they will sometimes appear
00:27bunched together on the sky if their orbits find them on the same side of the sun at the same
00:32time
00:34when this happens it looks like the planets have roughly formed a line from our vantage point on
00:39earth new sonifications from nasa's chandra x-ray observatory help commemorate this latest so-called
00:47planet parade in the latest sonifications three of the planets that will be on display jupiter
00:54saturn and uranus can be seen and heard in ways that they cannot from the ground on earth while
01:01chandra is best known for its x-ray insight into black holes and other extreme objects the telescope
01:06has also played an important role in the exploration of our solar system the sun gives off x-rays that
01:13travel out into the solar system and can be reflected by planets moons and other bodies
01:19this gives astronomers a unique window into certain physics that cannot be discovered through other
01:24kinds of telescopes the sonification of jupiter combines x-ray data from chandra with an infrared
01:31image from nasa's hubble space telescope woodwind sounds reveal chandra's x-ray data including
01:37emission from the planet's auroras more instruments join in to represent the planet's complex cloud layers
01:49next by combining an optical image from nasa's cassini mission with x-rays from chandra we can
01:55experience saturn like never before a siren-like sound follows the arc of the rings and different
02:02tones of synthesizers play as the scan passes the planet itself finally we can hear the ice giant of
02:11uranus through the data collected by chandra and the wm keck observatory the data in this
02:18sonification reflect the amount of the different light detected from the planet and the orientation
02:23of its ring sonifications are translations of astronomical data into sounds this process of
02:32translation preserves the integrity of the data which arrives on earth as a series of ones and zeros
02:38binary code and shifts it into a form that our brains can process through hearing sonifications
02:44expand options for people to explore what telescopes discover in space an example of nasa's ongoing
02:51commitment to share its data as widely as possible
03:13you
03:14you
03:14you
03:14you
03:14You
Comments