brianduffyhasabigbrain

We were then treated to Brian Duffy’s demonstration of how he has sonified the light from the stars by looking through telescopes at the night sky and then translating the frequencies of the light into sound frequencies. My favourite part of this was hearing him talk about the ‘pulsar’ – a rotating neutron star – discovered by Jocelyn Bell – (I am very taken by the story of her discovery which was recently featured on a BBC documentary). Anyway – if the rotation speed of the pulsar is fast enough, it can generate a pitch – so Brian asked a scientist to find pulsars with various pitches to work in a piece of music…