Cat's Eye Nebula

Sonification of Cat's Eye Nebula

Hubble’s Inside the Image: Cat's Eye Nebula

🐱 Cat’s Eye Nebula! This extraordinary cosmic object is called a planetary nebula, which form when a Sun-like star ejects its outer gaseous layers, creating a bright nebula with amazing shapes. Observations of the Cat’s Eye Nebula suggest that it was created by a star that cast off its mass in a series of pulses at 1,500-year intervals. Each resulting dust shell contains as much mass as all of the planets in our solar system combined…which is still only one percent of our Sun's mass! This nebul

🐱 👁️ 🎵 Experience the Cat’s Eye Nebula through sound! In this data sonification, information in the image is represented as music. A radar-like scan of the image emanates from the center point of the nebula and moves clockwise to produce pitch. Light that is further from the center is heard as higher pitches while brighter light is louder. X-rays from the Chandra X-ray Observatory are represented by a harsher sound, while the visible light data from Hubble sound smoother. Credits: NASA/CXC/SA