For decades, astronomers have collected observations across the electromagnetic spectrum — ranging from radio waves to visible light to X-rays — to study celestial objects. In the November issue, Raffaella Margutti described how she and her colleagues go one step further and convert those multiwavelength observations to sound, assigning each wavelength a musical instrument; they call this process “sonification.” The researchers are currently sonifying the deaths of massive stars to try to pick out often-hidden patterns and characteristics of a star’s final explosion.
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