"You take a million, billion tonnes of flaming inferno and turn it into 'twinkle, twinkle little star' ..."

Thu, 13 Dec 2007

CoRoT: Reporting on the 20th

So, SpaEurope blog reports, with independent confirmation at Dynamics of Cats, that the CoRoT team is ready to do a press release and conference on the 20th December.

Now to go convince my PhD Supervisor to hold off 'til after christmas for the Lit. Review. I suspect he will be devasated to have a hole open in his calendar right in the middle of a week when (undergrad) students are away, and all he has on his Todo list is his own research ...

Wed, 12 Dec 2007

Waiting for CoRoT

So, the CoRoT team apparently had a meeting in Paris on Monday. I've been waiting with baited breath (and intermittent internet access, for assorted reasons) for the results of a "Press Conference", that according to the blogosphere rumour mill, and a (started by a breathless interim report) was going to rewrite the sciences of exoplanets and stellar seismology. There were rumours of special editions of Nature (or Science, or A & A), Earth-mass planets (possible according to the apparent spec. of CoRoT).

This mattered to me as I'm finishing up a literature review for a PhD and the work is on exoplanets, and depends a lot on stellar variation. CoRoT could rewrite large sections of my conclusions. So, it looks like I finish my review and just have to be patient while they release their results in the proper peer-reviewed manner.

But it would probably be a good idea for the CoRoT team to set up a blog, as Rumour Central, to respond to mentions and rumours about their project that appear on the 'net. Kudos, for example, to Wesley Traub for taking the time to answer my questions aboout Darwin/TPF in this manner.