Astroboffins create music from SPAAAAAAAAAAACE Astrophysicists from the University of Birmingham have captured ‘sounds’ from the oldest stars in the Milky Way in a bid to study how the galaxy formed, according to research published today in the Royal Astronomical Society journal Monthly Notices. Strictly speaking, there is no sound in space since it is almost a perfect …
For my MSc thesis I worked on part of the design of an asteroseismometer, which used Doppler shifting of absorption lines in stellar spectra. In those days that approach produces a much stronger signal than a photometric approach (measuring the slight brightness fluctuations caused by the changes in temperature) used in the this study. Interesting to see the advances in precision in current instruments (I gather the data used were from the Keppler mission). Great work from those astroboffins
This garden universe vibrates complete,
Some, we get a sound so sweet.
Vibrations, reach on up to become light,
And then through gamma, out of sight.
Between the eyes and ears there lie,
The sounds of colour and the light of a sigh.
And to hear the sun, what a thing to believe,
But it's all around if we could but perceive.
To know ultra-violet, infra-red, and x-rays,
Beauty to find in so may ways.
Two notes of the chord, that's our poor scope,
And to reach the chord is our life's hope.
And to name the chord is important to some,
So they give it a word, and the word is OM.
In 1992, NASA released a now hard-to-find five-volume musical collection called "Symphonies of the Planets". They took electromagnetic sensor data from Voyager 1 and 2’s trip past Jupiter and Saturn, which happened over a decade prior. Solar winds and stellar radio waves were converted into sounds accessible to our ears.
I have two of those on CD. They're weirdly calming ambient soundscapes. I sometimes play one for background to fall asleep to.
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