Coming soon.
For the unintiated, CoRoT is a French small space telescope, optimised for high precision relative photometry of bright stars observed in the optical.
Originally conceived as an astroseismology mission, to study the oscillations and variability of solar like stars in the neighbourhood, it was rescoped before launch to be optimised for detecting planetary transits.
It has been up for almost a year, made a token discovery announcement after the first short run, and recently completed its first "long stare", 150 days of observing a single patch of the sky, continuously.
It is apparently working really well.
I mean, really well. The claim, now official on their website, is that CoRoT is operating at its theoretical best possible performance, limited only by photon counting noise. Which is astonishingly good.
Rumours are that they have found interesting things, maybe lots of interesting things, and that we will hear about them soon, pending ground based followups and getting papers written and submitted.
"...characteristics never reached before for which the satellite fulfils and surpass its originals specifications:
the precision with which the satellite is working, which is set by physical laws - not by the working of the instrument (the data are thus photon noise limited essentially over all magnitude ranges)"
...
"...CoRoT is discovering exo-planets at a rate only set by the available resources to follow up the detections"
Watch that space.
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How Soon ?
I've heard rumours of a special issue of Nature, etc. coming
soon. Presumably its been finalized with the reviewers, who
might know better :-)
I'm currently doing a lit. review, with heavy emphasis on
small exoplanets around M stars, which COROT risks
rewriting. Is it likely to come in the next few weeks?
Personally I'm more interested in the asteroseismology results. Who cares about a bunch of rocks and gas? I want to see inside the stars!
As I understand it, moons or rings around a transiting planet should be detectable from the shape of the transit light curve. Is CoRoT sensitive enough to detect these phenomena?
I couldn't say.
Gas can be interesting also.
And, yes. For some value of "moon" and "ring"
8th December press conference - apparantly
"Gas can be interesting also.
And, yes. For some value of 'moon' and 'ring.'"
The Integral Trees, 1984 science fiction novel by Larry Niven (ex-Caltech student) which was first published as a serial in Analog in 1983.
as wertperch summarized: "This fabulous novel is set in a fantastical world - the free-fall environment in a torus-shaped gaseous cloud surrounding a neutron star. Life has evolved in an oxygen envelope inside the 'The Smoke Ring' (the habitable part of the gas cloud) to take advantage of the unique conditions. The trees of the title are miles-long trunks, tipped with branches at both ends, which bend in the direction of prevailing winds to become shaped like integration signs - â«."
"The ecology includes water life in floating ponds (effectively huge water drops), a wide variety of flora and fauna (almost all of which is capable of flight) and most is edible, so the humans here (descendants from a colonisation ship's crew) are able to survive, living in and around the trees...."
See also:
Karl Schroeder [4 September 1962-] Canadian author born into the Mennonite community in Brandon, Manitoba, now lives in Toronto with his wife and daughter.
An author of far-future science fiction, Schroeder claims to present novel philosophical speculations in his work. Recently, the dazzling "Sun of Suns: Book One of Virga" [Tor, October 2006; originally serialized in Analog, November and December of 2005 and January/February and March of 2006] and sequel "Queen of Candesce."
As eyrie.org/~eagle/review summarizes:
"Virga is a world of multiple suns, a sphere of air full of drifting rocks and nations around a central manufactured sun. Each (major) nation has an artificial sun of its own to light and heat cubic miles of local space. The inhabitants build worlds out of metal and wood, spinning them for artificial gravity, and live with an odd sort of steampunk technology despite the extremely advanced technology required to build their world. The reasons are central to the plot of the book, but I suspect that the true reason was to create a compelling atmosphere of swashbuckling adventure, where the warships remind one of zepplins, boarders duel with swords, and men going overboard can float off through open air and only be lost if they die of thirst before finding another city or rescue (a frightening analogue to clinging to a raft after a shipwreck)."
'Around the 10th', according to my source (who should know!).
Malte: no fair pointing to something in Icelandic :-)
10th - Is that anything to do with the AGU meeting?
Swedish, I think. Icelandic would be unfair, but Swedish is okay. :-)
Hm, it has been a year since I spoke swedish, but they seem to have heard on a blog somewhere that something was up... ;-)
Seriously, sounds like a planned press release on monday. Which is curious since it does not match either Nature or Science publication...
The spacEurope blog has some inside information of the mission -- http://spaceurope.blogspot.com/search/label/COROT
I guess December 10 wasn't the day then.
Apparently it was a date of internal meeting. Last rumors talks about December 20...