The Sounds of BEARS

The Bright Extragalactic ALMA Redshift Survey, BEARS

The Bright Extragalactic ALMA Redshift Survey, or BEARS, is a project on the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA) to measure the redshifts of the brightest submillimetre galaxies on the Southern sky, discovered by the Herschel Space Observatory. So far we have measured secure (e.g. two-line) spectroscopic redshifts for 71 submillimetre galaxies in the Herschel ATLAS South Galactic Pole field, which we published in Urquhart et al. 2022 (BEARS paper I), and the continuum photometry will be published in Bendo et al. MN submitted (BEARS paper II). The emission line properties of the bright Herschel-selected galaxies in South Galactic Pole will soon be published in Hagimoto et al. 2022 (BEARS paper III).

The sounds of BEARS

It’s important for astronomy to become more accessible, so we’ve used the sonoUno package developed by the REINFORCE project to sonify some of our ALMA data. This page shows you what we’ve done, and walks you through how you can do it for yourself. SonoUno installation can be a bit involved, but fortunately there is a web interface for sonoUno that is very simple to use. Here is one of our first attempts to convert a .csv file of one of our BEARS spectra to a sonification, using the website.

Going from CARTA to sonoUno

Our BEARS survey data is now public on the ALMA archive, so it’s possible to go from the CARTA interface in the ALMA Science Archive all the way to a sonification. Here is an example:

Sonifying our stacked BEARS spectrum

Our BEARS projects identified the spectroscopic redshift for a totally of 71 galaxies. This video shows the process by which each spectrum is converted to a stacked spectrum and to a sonification very simply.

More sonifications

We will put in more material here as we make it.

Other ideas?

Credits

Written by Masato Hagimoto and Stephen Serjeant, August 2022.

This work was partly supported by the REINFORCE project. REINFORCE has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 project call H2020-SwafS-2018-2020 under Grant Agreement no. 872859. The content of this website does not represent the opinion of the European Commission, and the European Commission is not responsible for any use that might be made of such.