We Can Now Hear The 'Sound' of One of The Most Beautiful Stars [View all]

04 February 2023
By MICHELLE STARR



Hubble's image of RS Puppis. (NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-Hubble/Europe Collaboration)

You can now listen to the sounds of the space around one of the Milky Way's most spectacular stars.

RS Puppis, a Cepheid variable star around 6,500 light-years away, has gotten the data sonification treatment by the sci-art outreach project SYSTEM Sounds. They took a Hubble image of the star and transcribed the light into sound, assigning pitch to the direction from the center of the image and volume to the brightness of the light.

As you listen to the below sounds, a higher pitch can be heard at the top of the image and lower at the bottom; the left and right will play in their respective speakers if surround sound is active.

As the circle closes in on the bright star in the center, the sound gets louder, ending on a single convergence of sound.