On Friday 16th January at 7pm BBC1 will feature Alston Observatory on ‘The One Show’, in a piece entitled ‘The Music of the Spheres’. The show will be available on BBC iPlayer for another 30 days after transmission. The show will also feature an interview with UCLan Astrophysicist, Professor Donald Kurtz.
The programme discusses Pythagoras’ theorem that the planets of our solar system made music as they circled through the heavens. This is now known not to be true, although 17th century astronomer Johannes Kepler calculated that the orbits of the planets seemed to obey certain ratios similar to those of musical harmonies.
Professor Kurtz’s recent work with the NASA Kepler Space Telescope has allowed him to calculate the manner in which different stars vibrate and ‘ring’ like a bell. The BBC used a camera mounted on an octocopter to obtain aerial shots of the observatory.