Presentation #242.16 in the session Education Programs, Resources, and Research — iPoster Session.
As we are routinely discovering thousands of variables and transients, the extraordinary variety and impact of time domain astrophysics is widening exponentially. To encourage people of all backgrounds, learning styles, and abilities to engage with astronomical time domain research, we must develop science communication tools that are accessible and available to everyone. The Sensing the Dynamic Universe (SDU) website project creates sonified videos exploring the multitude of celestial variables such as stars, supernovae, quasars, gamma ray bursts and more. By rendering 2-D data (lightcurves and spectra) directly into sound, astronomical sonification makes the astrophysics of variables and transients accessible to the general public, with particular attention to accessibility for those with visual and/or neurological differences. The SDU project uses a multisensory approach, displaying videos of graphs that play sounds corresponding to the actual data points as an educational tool meant to enhance everyone’s understanding of the incredibly diverse phenomena found in the vast universe of time-domain astronomy.