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Stephen Chen

Scientists in Beijing have taken the regular beat emitted as electromagnetic radiation by two newly-discovered stars billions of kilometres away from earth and turned it into a piece of music.
The researchers at the National Astronomical Observatories hope it will help the public gain a better understanding of the stars, called pulsars.
The pair were discovered last month by the team in 47 Tucanae, a globular star cluster in the constellation Tucana about 16,700 light years away from earth.
Listen: the sound of the 47 Tucanae star cluster, remixed


Pulsars are dying stars that rotate and emit a powerful beam of electromagnetic radiation like a lighthouse at night.
The researchers took the signal pulse and converted it into sound waves that can be heard by the human ear.
They then used the beat to form the main ‘vocal part” for a 30-second piece of music.
The percussions and drums came from the frequency, or beat, of other known pulsars in the same star cluster.
The music’s volume also rises and falls in proportion to the variation of the pulsars’ radiation flow.
The stable, precise rotation of pulsar beams has been used by astronomers as a “cosmic clock” to study a wide range of issues such as the bending of space time, the rippling of gravitational waves and the mapping of galaxies.
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Pulsars are rare. The 47 Tucanae, visible to the naked eye as one of the brightest globular clusters in the sky, contains millions of stars, but only a few pulsars have been found.
The discovery by the team increased the total number of pulsars in 47 Tucanae to 25.
The study was published in the monthly notices letter of the Royal Astronomical Society and the data used by the team was collected at the Parkes Observatory in Australia.
The discovery of the pulsars showed that Chinese astronomers have developed competent software and data mining technology to detect signals that have passed unnoticed in previous studies, said Xu Renxin, an astrophysicist at Peking University, who was not involved in the research.
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The same software and technology could be used to analyse data collected by the 500 metre aperture spherical telescope in Guizhou province in China, he said. Xu and the head of the Beijing team are involved in the project.
The telescope, the world’s largest single dish telescope, is slated for launch in August.


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Science

Music of the spheres: Chinese scientists use distant pulse from space to create the ‘song’ of two dying stars