fivemack: (Default)
[personal profile] fivemack
These are the light curves, between February and April 2007, of the hundred Corot stars for which the 99th percentile brightness and the 1st percentile brightness differ by the largest multiple of the 1st percentile brightness - IE, the most variable ones.

You can see pairs of stars which whirl around one another in eight or nine hours (these look like thick lines, eg the fourth curve, and if there seems to be a condensation within the curve that's where the fainter star passes behind the brighter), and stars in whose old age the convection cells are stirred to brightness over a period of months (eg the 18th curve).

I don't know whether the stars that suddenly (and it is suddenly - each measurement is over an eight-minute period) appear to change brightness stepwise are showing some subtle feature of the instrumentation which requires handling in the data reduction, or are showing thermonuclear explosions in the accretion discs around white dwarves.

This represents about 1% of the smallest of the released Corot datasets, or more deliberate measurements of star brightnesses than every amateur astronomer on Earth since the invention of the telescope. Kepler, launched a few days ago, will look at thirty times as many stars at about the same sampling rate and for ten times as long.

None of these stars is bright enough to see with the naked eye.



The filenames include the Corot catalogue number of the star.

Date: 2009-03-09 10:26 pm (UTC)
emperor: (Default)
From: [personal profile] emperor
Pretty curves, even if I have very little idea of what they really signify.

Date: 2010-10-20 03:57 am (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
quite interesting, i hope to find more information about the analysing of these data.

Date: 2012-02-16 10:18 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] sturrockru.livejournal.com
Большое спасибо! Взяла себе тоже-пригодится.Image (http://zimnyayaobuv.ru/)Image (http://zimnyaya-obuv.ru/)

March 2024

S M T W T F S
     12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24 252627282930
31      

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Sep. 23rd, 2025 03:58 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios