Speaker
Description
Within the vast field of Astrophysics, the study of variable stars is
expansive and inclusive. Groundbreaking discoveries can be made with
modest instrumentation and small telescopes, also by amateurs, and
treasure troves of new unexplored data are available to the scientific
community and the public. Therefore, this field lends itself perfectly
to involving more people in astronomical research, sharing a cosmic
perspective on our human scientific endeavors, and using it as a
“hook” for STEAM education.
AstroSounds is a citizen science project investigating the extent to
which the human ear can distinguish the timbre of different pulsating
star types. At the same time, it is an educational project inspired by
the research field of asteroseismology, naturally linking different
STEAM curriculum topics, such as physics, mathematics, biology,
chemistry, and music education. The multimodal exploration of data,
including the auditory channel, opens the field of astronomy to people
with visual impairments.
In the successful pilot project of AstroSounds, which ran in Belgium
from 2020 onwards and was funded by the Flemish government, numerous
light curves, gathered with space missions and ground-based telescopes,
were used for sonification.
In this contribution, I will briefly describe the work behind the scenes
to set up our citizen science project and its STEAM education component,
as well as the sonification method. Subsequently, I would like to
exchange on potential synergies and avenues of collaboration with the
CREDO network.
