Unexpected data release

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.

Data overload

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.

( Lightcurves ahoy! (100 medium pictures; click for bigger ones) )