This is what Abell 370, a galaxy cluster containing several hundred galaxies, sounds like


Devdiscourse News Desk | California | Updated: 23-05-2022 10:11 IST | Created: 23-05-2022 10:11 IST
This is what Abell 370, a galaxy cluster containing several hundred galaxies, sounds like
Image Credit: NASA, ESA/Hubble, HST Frontier Fields

Ever wondered what the music of an enormous cluster of galaxies would sound like? NASA has released a sonification - translation of astronomical data into sound - of Abell 370, a galaxy cluster containing several hundred galaxies.

In this sonification of Abell 370, which was originally released in 2020, sound waves are generated based on the brightness and position of the cosmic objects in the image. Brighter light is converted into louder sound, and the frequency increases from the bottom to the top of the image, NASA said.

Listen to the scary sounds coming from this gigantic galaxy cluster:

Credits: NASA/Hubble; Sonification: SYSTEM Sounds (M. Russo, A. Santaguida)

Galaxy clusters are the largest objects in the universe held together by gravity. They contain individual galaxies as well as vast amounts of multimillion-degree gas that emits X-rays, and dark matter that supplies most of the gravity of the cluster.

Abell 370 is one of the very first galaxy clusters in which astronomers observed the phenomenon of gravitational lensing, the warping of spacetime by the cluster's gravitational field that distorts the light from galaxies lying far behind it. The galaxy cluster lies about 4 billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Cetus.

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