Listen to This Month's "Planet Parade" with NASA's Chandra

The Planets Jupiter, Uranus, and Saturn
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Sonification Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/K.Arcand, SYSTEM Sounds (M. Russo, A. Santaguida)

In late February, people in the Northern Hemisphere can look up for a special sight: Six planets will all be visible from clear and dark night skies. New sonifications from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory released Wednesday will help commemorate this latest “planetary parade.”

Because the planets in our solar system travel around the Sun in the same plane (known as the ecliptic), they will sometimes appear bunched together in the sky when their orbits find them on the same side of the Sun at the same time. When this happens, it looks like the planets have roughly formed a line from our vantage point on Earth.

In Chandra’s sonifications, which translate astronomical data into sound, three of the planets that will be on display — Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus — can be seen and heard in ways that they cannot from Earth.

While Chandra is best known for its X-ray insight into black holes and other extreme objects, the telescope has also played an important role in the exploration of our solar system. The Sun gives off X-rays that travel out into the solar system and can be reflected by planets, moons, and other bodies. This gives astronomers a unique window into certain physics that cannot be discovered through other kinds of telescopes.

The sonification of Jupiter combines X-ray data from Chandra with an infrared image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Woodwind sounds reveal Chandra’s X-ray data, including emission from the planet’s auroras. More instruments join in to represent the planet’s complex cloud layers. Next, through the combination of an optical image from NASA’s Cassini mission and X-rays from Chandra, listeners can experience Saturn like never before. A siren-like sound follows the arc of the rings, and different tones of synthesizers play as the scan passes the planet itself. Finally, listeners can hear the ice giant Uranus through the data collected by Chandra and the W.M. Keck Observatory. The data in this sonification reflects the amount of light detected from the planet and the orientation of its ring.

The process of creating a sonification preserves the integrity of the data, which arrives on Earth as a series of ones and zeroes (binary code), and shifts it into a form that can be processed through hearing. Sonifications expand options for people to explore what telescopes discover in space, an example of NASA’s ongoing commitment to share its data as widely as possible.

Jupiter:

In this image, the amount of diffuse X-rays from a donut-shaped ring of energetic particles around Jupiter, seen on the left and right side of the planet, has been enhanced compared to the amount of X-rays from the planet's auroras, seen at the poles. As the scan moves left to right, it encounters X-rays that bracket the planet on either side, and this plays as woodwind sounds. As we pass over the planet itself, seen in an infrared image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the sounds become fuller as the infrared data is represented by other instruments. Since Jupiter is tilted slightly, the pitch descends as the scan passes over the bright band near the equator and through the Great Red Spot. On the other side, more X-ray data from Chandra flanks the planet and can be heard as gusty wind sounds at the end.

Saturn:

The scan of Saturn begins on the right and moves to the left. As it encounters Saturn’s famous rings, seen in an optical image from the Cassini mission, listeners hear a siren effect whose frequency follows the arc of the rings. Once the scan reaches the planet itself, the sounds change, to lower tones with a dark synthetic bass sound. This distinguishes the rings from the planet. Chandra’s X-rays are heard as higher synthetic tones that mark where high-energy activity is found across the planet, rings, and poles.

Uranus:

Returning to the left to right scan, the sounds begin with a cello that traces the arcing ring — not as famous as Saturn’s but still prominent — around the ice giant Uranus. The notes change to represent the amount of reflected light and its location on Uranus as seen in an optical light image from the W.M. Keck Observatory. The X-rays detected by Chandra, which come from X-rays from the Sun that are reflected, are heard as higher frequencies as the scan passes over the pinkish region of the planet. The apparent asymmetry in the X-rays may not be a real effect because of the faint signal and the smoothing that was applied to the image.

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts

For more on the Chandra sonification program, visit https://chandra.si.edu/sound/