Are you ready to listen to one of the largest and brightest star formation regions near the Milky Way? 🎧

The cosmic view of the spectacular 30 Doradus is a combination of X-rays from NASA Chandra Xray and infrared data from NASA James Webb. Chandra's X-rays reveal superheated gases due to shock waves created by the winds of massive stars. Webb's infrared data, on the other hand, reveals cooler gas that will contribute to the formation of future stars.

Image Description:
In this composite visualisation, a star field is partially obscured by a red nebula of cosmic gas and dust and bright blue X-ray clouds. Near the centre of the visualisation, a break in the nebula surrounded by white clouds reveals a brightly glowing star and the central star cluster of 30 Doradus. A vertical line runs across the images from left to right, triggering musical sounds as different elements are encountered. The higher the element in the frame, the higher the pitch of the sound. In the Chandra section of the soundtrack, a mottled cloud of bright blue X-ray light is paired with notes in an airy synthesiser. In the Webb Telescope infrared section of the audio, the red nebula is mapped to soft, low musical pitches and the thin white cloud to harsh, high-frequency, wind-like sounds. Stars are played on a piano-like synthesiser and percussive triangles show diffraction spikes. A rain bar represents the stars belonging to the central cluster.

What is sonification?
Sonification is a process that translates astronomical data into sound, similar to the more routine conversion of digital data into images. This translation process preserves the science of the data from its original digital form, but provides an alternative way to experience the data.

Sonification Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/K.Arcand, SYSTEM Sounds (M. Russo, A. Santaguida)

Image Credit:
X-ray (Chandra): NASA/CXC/Penn State Univ./L. Townsley et al;
IR (Webb): NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/JWST ERO Production Team