We can’t see Fast Radio Bursts but we can now hear them thanks to a Finnish Cathedral
AI-summarised brief · reviewed before publication
Fast radio bursts (FRBs)—millisecond‑long flashes that release as much energy as the Sun emits in three days—have been “sonified” for the first time. Using data from the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), which recorded 4,539 bursts from 3,641 sources between 2018 and 2023, artist‑composer Andrew Melchior and MIT physicist Kiyoshi Masui translated each signal’s frequency sweep into musical pitches. The resulting soundscape, titled “The Logos,” is played through twelve speakers in Oulu Cathedral, Finland, where the youngest bursts are about 50 million years old and the oldest approach 9 billion years. The installation runs daily through the end of the year, and on 21 November singers will perform live alongside the cosmic tones, illustrating how intergalactic dispersion shapes the audible pattern.
💡 Why It Matters
- · By converting invisible cosmic events into sound, the project gives the public a visceral sense of the universe’s scale and the physical processes that stretch radio waves over billions of years.
