'Happy Halloween': NASA shares creepy 'face' of interacting galaxies & scary sonification

On Halloween, October 31, NASA’s Hubble uploaded a spooky digital sonification of two colliding galaxies that created a “creepy” face in space. Sharing the audio clip of the petrifying and ghostly sounds from space, NASA’s Hubble wrote on its official Twitter handle that the sonification of titanic head-on collision of menacing-looking galaxies “will send shivers” down the spine of the space buffs. NASA transformed the Hubble’s iconic image of scary cosmic sights, into a spooky Halloween astronomical marvel for the astrophiles. 

With an emoticon of the pumpkin patch and a skeleton, NASA wished everyone a “Happy Halloween”. Meanwhile, a commenter asked what the “sonification” of an image meant. “Is this actually what space sounds like, and if so how did? Or did they just set arbitrary sounds coded different colors or something and feed the picture through it to create noise?” The others stunned at the spooky Halloween sonification answered that NASA compiled the energy of radio waves collected by the satellites. “Convert Hubble image into a sound wave,” another responded. According to NASA, the data sonification transformed Hubble’s space pictures into sound. The elements of the image, such as the depth and brightness assigned pitches and volumes to the sound. 

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Explaining the theory behind the galaxy’s chilling Halloween face, NASA wrote, “Although galaxy collisions are common — especially back in the young universe — most of them are not head-on smashups, like the collision that likely created this Arp-Madore system. The violent encounter gives the system an arresting "ring" structure for only a short amount of time, about 100 million years.”

Ghastly apparition from young, blue stars

In the clip shared by NASA to match the Halloween fervour, the two galaxies colliding resembles a face with bright “eyes” formed out of the bright cores, and a face out of the ring of young, blue stars. Other clumps of new stars form a nose and mouth. The colliding galaxies are known as the Arp-Madore 2026-424 (AM 2026-424) and is approximately 704 million light-years from Earth. According to NASA the system Arp-Madore is one of the spookiest and comes under the"Catalogue of Southern Peculiar Galaxies and Associations.”

[In this new Hubble Space Telescope image, an uncanny pair of glowing eyes glares menacingly in our direction. The piercing "eyes" are the most prominent feature of what resembles the face of an otherworldly creature. Credit: NASA]

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