We Can Now Hear the Sound of One of the Milky Way's Most Beautiful Stars

Converting visual data into auditory data makes it more accessible to people with visual impairments. In addition, this approach can reveal details in the data, like patterns and weaker signals, that might otherwise be overlooked.

We Can Now Hear the Sound of One of the Milky Way's Most Beautiful Stars

Researchers from the SYSTEM Sounds sci-art outreach project have imagined what one of the Milky Way's most spectacular stars might sound like.

To do so, they took a Hubble image of the star called RS Puppis, which is about 6,500 light years away from Earth, 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.

Converting visual data into auditory data makes it more accessible to people with visual impairments. In addition, this approach can reveal details in the data, like patterns and weaker signals, that might otherwise be overlooked.