[wefarrell]

Crazy to think that we’re been observing the cosmos for thousands of years through a single sense and we only recently opened up a second one. What a time to be alive!

[OscarCunningham]

Actually there's also this from two days ago, using neutrinos to observe space: Drexel Physicists Produce New Images of Milky Way Galaxy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36525455

[simonh]

I just watched the video, and as far as I can tell they didn’t actually convert the wave form into sound and play it. I feel cheated.

[wefarrell]

They can do that with waves that come from LIGO because they happen to have frequencies that are audible when converted to sound. In this case the wave periods are measured in years rather than milliseconds.

[magicalhippo]

To be specific, they measure waves with a frequency measured in nano-Hz, which means a period on the order of decades.

[smallnamespace]

It's trivial to shift frequencies up or down

[wefarrell]

For the LIGO waves they didn’t need to since the frequencies corresponded to audio frequencies that are audible by human ears.

[smallnamespace]

Yes but for those motivated to hear the low-frequency waves, adding a frequency shift to the end of the signal processing pipeline would've been trivial.

Since the incremental effort is so low, it really doesn't matter much what the original frequency range of a signal is.

[magicalhippo]

> it really doesn't matter much what the original frequency range of a signal is

It does matter. The waves they measure have so low frequency they've barely measured a single period of it. The higher frequency waves are lost in the noise.

So what should they play? A single 1kHz note is pretty uninteresting.

[themitigating]

I need to taste a supernova

[Eldt]

I want to see x rays!