In 2011, it was discovered that the star Kepler-18 has 3 exoplanets using the Photometric Transit method. I thought, why not try to make an audio file out of the data collected by the Kepler satellite on this light curve!

When the planet passes over the star, the observed intensity light will dip:

It turns out that Kepler-18 has 3 planets orbiting the star:
Image Credit: Tim Jones/McDonald Obs./UT-Austin

The light curve data is available at the caltech.edu website
Image Credit: exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu

Using the following code I converted the light curve data into a wave audio file:

from scipy.io.wavfile import write as wav
import pandas

tbl = pandas.read_table('plot.tbl', comment='#', delim_whitespace=True) # open table as pandas dataframe
lc = tbl[2:].iloc[:,2][:64431]                                          # isolate column of light curve data
lc = lc.astype(str).astype(float)                                       # converting numpy array from float to strings
lcnp = lc.values                                                        # pandas.core.series.series to numpy.ndarray
rescale = lcnp * 100                                                    # increase amplitude
wav('Kepler-18.wav', 44100, rescale)                                    # create wave file
 

Here is the resulting audio file:

After aplying a noise gate, I was able to isolate the clicks by removing the low amplitude noise. It’s a crude method of truncating the noise, but it allows us to hear the individual transits far more clearly:

Here’s a video that explains Transit Photometry in more detail: