Sounds of the Universe
Sound provides a unique way to engage with the Universe. The excerpts below all connect to the SKAO’s mission to better understand the cosmos.
Pulsars: astronomers' clocks
Pulsars are extremely fast-spinning stars that regularly send out a pulse. They are the Universe's clocks and can be used to detect gravitational waves. Listen to their rhythm below.
Vela pulsar
This pulsar lies near the centre of the Vela supernova remnant, which is the debris of the explosion of a massive star about 10,000 years ago. The pulsar rotates with a period of 89 milliseconds or about 11 times a second. This recording has been made with the first four SKA-Low stations in Australia.
The data in this video was obtained at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, the CSIRO Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory. The SKAO and CSIRO acknowledge the Wajarri Yamaji as the Traditional Owners and Native Title Holders of the observatory site.
Brightest pulsar
This is the brightest radio pulsar in the northern sky rotating with a period of 0.714520 seconds giving it a locomotive kind of sound. This recording has been made with the Lovell telescope in Jodrell Bank.
Fast-spinning pulsar
This is the brightest so-called milli-second pulsar known. This pulsar was ‘wound up’ by its companion star. As its partner grew to a red giant, mass was transferred to this pulsar making it spin faster. It now rotates about 174 times a second, so fast that the signal sounds like an overactive bumble-bee. This recording has been made with the Parkes radio telescope in Australia.
More pulsars available on the website of Jodrell Bank Observatory.
The girl who made the stars
The artwork “the girl who made the stars” by Jeni Couzyn (2014) featured in the Shared Sky exhibition which brought together Aboriginal Australian and South African artists in a collaborative exhibition celebrating humanity’s ancient cultural wisdom.
This quilt features a traditional South African |Xam story about the creation of the Milky Way. Jostine Loubser, lecturer at the University of Salford, saw the exhibition at the SKAO Headquarters in the UK and was inspired to compose the above music piece which also features the hydrogen signal from our Milky Way captured by the Tabletop Radio Telescope. The composition was performed by members of the Adelphi Contemporary Music Group and was recorded, mixed and mastered by Dr Phil Brissenden of the University of Salford in May 2025.
The traditional story goes as follows:
A girl of the early times was hungry and cross in her confinement hut during her first menses. She was not allowed to gather food for herself, and had to rely on the |huin roots her mother brought her. Nor was she allowed to be seen by the young hunters, or eat their meat, in case their arrows should grow cold and their hunting fail. The pressure inside her grew and grew till she flung the wood ashes from her fire into the sky. “You who are wood ashes, you will altogether become the Milky Way, and sail through the sky, following your footprints, so people coming home by night can see their way.”
SKA-Low's first image
Listen to the dozens of radio galaxies in the first image from the SKA-Low telescope. The radio galaxies are represented by notes on a glockenspiel where the brightest galaxies sound loud and high, and dimmer galaxies soft and low.
As we sweep around the image in an anti-clockwise manner, we hear the distribution of the galaxies across this patch of sky. Listen with headphones for the full stereo experience.