Enjoy The Holiday Sounds Of Space With The Help Of New NASA Sonification

A new holiday sonification from NASA featuring the massive star RS Puppis has been released. This sonification provides an audio approach to explore the picture of the enormous star and is based on an image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. With points of light towards the top of the image denoting higher pitch notes and points near the bottom denoting lower pitch notes, the sounds in the sonification begin at the edges and progress toward the center. Brighter lights are like bells, and louder noises are like brighter lights. A Cepheid variable star, such as RS Puppis, is an illustration of a type of star that was crucial to the advancement of astronomy. With RS Puppis brightening throughout a six-week period, the brightness of these stars pulses. Crucially, the luminosity of these kinds of stars is correlated with the time of their pulsation, as pioneering astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt found in 1908. Astronomers can therefore estimate a Cepheid variable star's luminosity b monitoring how long the pulse lasts. They can then utilize this information to precisely calculate its distance by comparing its luminosity to its observed brightness. So, for the first time, astronomers were able to determine distances to distant galaxies with accuracy thanks to the features of these stars. The RS Puppis image used as the basis for the sonification was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2013. Astronomers were interested in examining the light echo, or how light reflects across the dust surrounding the star, in addition to the star's pulse. "Astronomers are able to measure these light echoes and nail down a fairly accurate distance by detecting the fluctuation of light in RS Puppis itself, as well as recording the faint reflections of light pulses travelling across the nebula," Hubble scientists stated at the time. "With only a 1% error margin, the distance to RS Puppis has been reduced to 6,500 light-years."