Now you can listen to the sounds of space around one of the most spectacular stars in the Milky Way. RS Puppis, a Cepheid variable star located about 6,500 light-years away, has undergone sound therapy by the SYSTEM Sounds science and art project. They took an image of the Hubble star and converted the light into sound by assigning the pitch from the center to the direction of the image and volume to the brightness of the light.

When listening to the following sounds, you may hear a higher pitch at the top of the picture and a lower pitch at the bottom; If surround sound is enabled, left and right will be played on the respective speakers. The sound gets louder as the circle approaches the bright star in the center and ends with a single sound approaching.

Sonifying the Universe offers another way to experience the wonders of space, but there are some really good reasons to do so.

First, converting visual data to audio makes it more accessible to people who are visually impaired or blind. It can also facilitate the understanding of complex concepts by offering a new perspective. It can also reveal details, patterns, weak signals, or information that would otherwise be lost due to noise in data that might have been overlooked in their original state.

For something like the Cepheid variable this would be a powerful tool as they are among the most useful stars in the galaxy. The brightness of these stars changes regularly; For RS Puppis, the duration is about six weeks. Many stars vary in brightness, but for Cepheid variables there is a known and clear relationship between the star’s brightness and its periodicity.

So when you time a Cepheid variable, you can determine exactly how bright it is at its core—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 tell how far away it is. This means we can use Cepheid variables to map galactic distances.

RS Puppis, the brightest variable Cepheid with an average luminosity of 15,000 times that of the Sun, is also surrounded by dust. As the star shines, it sends a brighter flash of light into the dust. This light is reflected from the dust and produces a faint echo; This is why beautiful silver rings form around the star.

By studying these rings, scientists can understand dust and its properties, which can tell us more about the matter that fills the space between stars. RS Puppis’ voice seems to be more informational than science, and in any case the star has been extremely well studied, so it’s unclear whether we’ll learn anything new from the transformation.