A little over six months ago, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) delivered its first photographs, dazzling the world as it revealed the cosmos in glorious technicolour. The first picture transmitted in July showed a galaxy cluster located in the Southern hemisphere sky, 5.12 billion light years from Earth. In the words of US president Joe Biden, it represented “the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe” taken by humanity so far.
But NASA didn’t content itself with unveiling these first JWST images visually. Tapping into the long love story between music and astronomy, scientists mapped out the colours to different pitches of sound.
