Listen to the strange sounds coming from this Cosmic Reef 163,000 light-years away

Ever wondered what the music of a cosmic reef would sound like? NASA has posted a sonification - the translation of astronomical data into sound - video of the Cosmic Reef formed by two nebulas in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our home galaxy - the Milky Way.

The sonification is based on images captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3. The above Hubble image shows how young, energetic, massive stars illuminate and sculpt their birthplace with powerful winds and searing ultraviolet radiation. It is nicknamed the Cosmic Reef because the nebulas resemble an undersea world.

The giant red nebula, NGC 2014, and its smaller blue companion, NGC 2020, are part of a vast star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, located 163,000 light-years away.

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

According to NASA, the NGC 2014's centrepiece is a grouping of bright, hefty stars, each 10 to 20 times more massive than our Sun. The stars' ultraviolet radiation heats the surrounding dense gas. The massive stars also unleash fierce winds of charged particles that blast away lower-density gas, forming the bubble-like structures seen on the right, which resemble coral.

The powerful stellar winds are pushing gas and dust to the denser left side of the nebula, where it is piling up and creating a series of dark ridges bathed in starlight. The blue areas in NGC 2014 reveal the glow of oxygen, heated to nearly 20,000 degrees Fahrenheit by the blast of ultraviolet light while the cooler, red gas indicates the presence of hydrogen and nitrogen.

On the other hand, the blue nebula at the lower left has been created by a solitary mammoth star 200,000 times brighter than our Sun. The blue gas was ejected by the star through a series of eruptive events during which it lost part of its outer envelope of material.