Did you ever watch stars, and hear distant singing?
New telescopes see that the galaxy’s ringing!
Listen now carefully, open your ears
To Johannes Kepler’s great “music of spheres.”
Celestial music, slight changes in brightness,
Give star-gazers feelings of joy and of lightness,
But even more thrilling is what we are learning,
Like what the deep cores of red giants are burning!
Formation of elements, galaxy nascence …
There’s no doubt about it: we’ve got good vibrations!
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Further reading:
Kepler’s Surprise: The Sounds of the Stars, Cowen, Nature 2012
The Sun and the Stars: Giving Light to Dark Matter, Casanellas and Lopes, Modern Physics Letters A, 2014
This is one in a series of poems written by Katherine Allen, a researcher in geochemistry and paleoclimate at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University. “Celestial Music” was first published on the author’s website in 2012.
