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

[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."