You can now hear the sounds of space around one of the Milky Way’s most spectacular stars.
RS Puppis, a Variable star of the Cepheids about 6,500 light-years away, has received data sonication treatment by the Sci-Art Outreach project SYSTEM sounds. They took a Hubble image of the star and transcribed the light into sound, attributing pitch to the direction from the center of the image and loudness to the light’s brightness.
If you listen to the tones below, you will hear a higher pitch at the top of the picture and a lower pitch at the bottom; left and right are played in their respective speakers when surround sound is active.
As the circle approaches the bright center star, the tone grows louder, ending with a single tone convergence.
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Sonifying the Universe offers a different way to experience the wonders of the cosmos, but there are some really useful reasons for doing so, too.
For one, converting visual data into auditory data makes it more accessible to people with low vision or blindness. It can also make complex concepts easier to understand by offering a fresh perspective.
It can also reveal details in the data that might be missed in their original form, by showing patterns, weaker signals, or information that would be lost in the noise.
For something like a Cepheid variable star, that would be a powerful tool as they are some of the most useful stars in the galaxy.
These stars regularly vary in brightness; for RS Puppis the period is about six weeks. Many stars vary in brightness, but for Cepheid variables there is a known and unambiguous relationship between the star’s brightness and its periodicity.
So once you have the timing of a Cepheid variable, you can calculate exactly how bright it actually is – not how bright it appears to us on Earth, but how much light it actually emits. And if you know how bright something is, you can calculate how far away it is. This means we can use Cepheid variables to represent distances in the galaxy.
RS Puppis, the brightest Cepheid variable with an average brightness 15,000 times that of the Sun, is also surrounded by dust. As the star brightens, it emits a brighter flash of light into the dust. This light is reflected by the dust and creates a light echo; This forms the beautiful silver rings around the star.
By studying these rings, scientists can understand the dust and its properties, which can tell us more about the material that fills the space between stars.
This sonification of RS Puppis appears to be more for publicity than science, and the star is extraordinarily well studied anyway, so it’s not clear if we’ll learn anything new from the transformation.
But it’s nice to have a new way to experience one of our favorite stars.
