151K views · 6.5K reactions | Sometimes sound gives us a different...

Close-up: The Helix Nebula in Aquarius | James Webb Space Telescope FriendsofNASA.org: A new image from the James Webb Space Telescope of a portion of the Helix Nebula highlights comet-like knots, fierce stellar winds, and layers of gas shed off by a dying star interacting with its surrounding environment. Webb’s image also shows the stark transition between the hottest gas to the coolest gas as the shell expands out from the central white dwarf. First spotted in the early 1800s, the Helix Nebul

The Helix Nebula is 655 light-years away from us, and 3 light-years across! Near the end of a Sun-like star’s life, nebulae like this form when the star sheds some of its outer material. In this sonification, red light is assigned lower pitches and blue light is assigned higher pitches. Just as the frequencies of light increase from red to blue, frequencies of sound increase from low to high pitches. While there’s no sound in space, sonifications like this help us conceptualize the data in astro

8.3K views · 200 reactions | The Helix Nebula in Aquarius | Webb,...