Key Concepts

The Sensing the Dynamic Universe project uses sonified videos to demonstrate and explain the properties of many kinds of celestial variables. What do we mean by a variable? Please visit our page called "What is a Variable?" to find out.

How are variables discovered? How are they measured? Where does a light curve come from that displays the changes in brightness as a function of time? Learn more by visiting our Variability Surveys page.

We discover variable objects in the sky by changes in their brightness over time. Plots and sonified videos of these changes are explained in our page called "Light Curve".

We can learn more about every kind of variable by studying its spectrum. A spectrum is just a detailed plot of an object's color, which we represent as a plot or sonified video of brightness versus wavelength. The plural word for a spectrum is spectra. Learn about spectra and our sonified videos of them on our page called "Spectrum".