Unexpected data release

[fivemack]

It may well be that this data release was not thoroughly announced because the population of amateur asteroseismologists is zero, but

http://idc-corotn2-public.ias.u-psud.fr/invoquerSva.do?sva=browseGraph

has light-curve data from several chunks of the Corot planet-hunting and asteroseismology mission.

This is one of those annoying missions which is looking for exciting objects, and has many probable detections, each of which requires half a dozen observations on well-spaced nights from incredibly oversubscribed large telescopes to confirm; the Corot team has only announced confirmed discoveries, but there are probably a fair number of unannounced planets sitting in the dataset.

Yes, the big data set is 14GB long compressed, but there must be somebody who'd prefer the potential of fifty undiscovered planets to six downloaded HDTV movies.

Comments

[del-c.livejournal.com]

Out of that fifty, some of them might be transiting, and the population of amateurs equipped to detect transiting extrasolar planets is not zero.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Corot is there precisely to detect transiting planets; the issue is that some implausible configurations of oddly-aligned binary stars (for example a normal eclipsing binary far beyond the observed star but blended with it on the CCD by the small resolution of the Corot telescope) can mimic the light curves of transiting planets, and those have to be sorted out by radial-velocity measurements, which need lots of light and spectrographs of unreasonable stability. You might well also need adaptive-optics high-resolution imaging to rule out some of the blended-light cases, which is again amateur-impractical.

[ellarien]

The population of professional asteroseismologists is pretty tiny, too, though bigger than it used to be. (Just try getting two weeks of dark time on a major telescope to observe Procyon. My old boss wore out his welcome at most of the observatories in the southern hemisphere doing that, back in the days when 2m was big.) I think there were about thirty of them at the big biennial helio/asteroseismology conference last summer; I certainly got the impression then that the advent of Corot and the promise of other space-based missions had expanded the field rather suddenly and produced something of a data overload.

[simont]

I hadn't encountered the word "asteroseismology" before, and had to look it up to confirm that it wasn't a misspelling. How come it isn't "astro-" as I would expect it to be? I'm guessing it's because "astro-" has been persistently misused to mean space in general rather than stars in particular, but I'm hoping there'll be a more interesting answer :-)

[ellarien]

There's a long (and possibly not entirely serious) explanation from one of the early leading lights in the field in The Observatory (NASA ADS link, from which you can get the PDF if interested.) It seems to agree with your guess, more or less. "In view of the rather more catholic use of the [astro] prefix, in both classic and modern times, it is appropriate that present-day astronomers and astrophysicists do not confine their studies solely to the stars. Since asteroseismology pertains specifically to stars, and particularly to individual stars, the appellation is etymologically preferable. Indeed, that is why it was so chosen." The author is more scornful of mixed constructions like "solar seismology" and "stellar seismology," though.

I note that we (helioseismologists) haven't actually adopted terms such as "telechroneoseismology"; we mostly just call that "time-distance."