How sound is providing new clues about the Universe

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Key Points

Other instruments detect black hole accretion discs, gravitational waves, pulsars, quasars, exoplanets, as well as indirect evidence of invisible phenomena like dark matter and dark energy...

Just as scientists use colour, shape, and size to visually represent different types of data, they can use timbre, volume, pitch, spacialisation and other sound qualities to expand the parameter space..

After all, that's what we do with images," Zanella says.. ddition to opening new avenues for research and knowledge creation, data sonification also creates new entry points into professional and amateur astronomy, both for people with visual impairments, and also for people who interpret sounds more easily than pictures...

Hundreds of research and outreach projects currently use sonified data from astronomy to offer more people more ways to explore the invisible Universe...

Around 240 million years ago, a black hole deep in the Perseus galaxy cluster was going about its business, devouring its accretion disc, and creating huge pressure waves in the surrounding superheated gas..

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