The CoRoT team had a meeting, I wasn't there, but...
No press release, right now, someone must have confused "meeting" with "announcement". There are news, but I am firmly told that they are not announcing a terrestrial planet discovery or any such.
Be interesting to see what they have after the first look, any announcements at this point will be limited by the need to do ground based followup for confirmation.
The most interesting objects will be those showing clear periodic low amplitude variation with transit like profiles and no apparent velocity variation (since the first cut is to eliminate the high velocity variables which are grazing eclipse binaries).
There will be some CoRoT results soon. Can't say what.
More like this
Status of CoRoT and Kepler missions is reviewed at the "Exoplanets Rising" workshop at the Kavli Institute, we'll see if there are any news.
CoRoT is up first. Magali Deleuil presenting.
Kepler next with Bill Borucki.
Definitive word on the CoRoT results...
COROT launched successfully on a Soyuz
Corot is a very nifty little satellite.
It is a french space agency small satellite, designed to measure convection, rotation and to find planets.
Results as in published papers or results as in a press release I wonder?
It was widely acknowledged that the primary work product of Engineering is paper, and the easiest way to generate paper is to hold meetings. This was when I was an Engineer at Boeing, Burroughs, European Space Agency, Federal Aviation Administration, Ford, General Motors, Hughes, JPL, Lear Astronics, NASA, Systems Development Corporation, U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, U.S. Air Force, Venture Technologies, Yamaha, ...
When I evolved into Management, I ruthlessly cut down on meetings and emphasized the production of things that actually mattered, such as sending me to conferences in nice venues.
When at last I was elevated to Executive Management, I set aside such childish things. It was now obvious that what really mattered was the valuation of our firm by Venture Capital, and how we would be cashed out at the Liquidity Event.
Oh, you were talking about Science? Of course, Science has nothing to do with engineering, management, or money.
Thank you very much for the update (and for the thoughtful explanation in the ho ho ho comments). The suspense was really building up.
I keep idly wondering about a system in which scientists in discovery-based fields could feel free to reveal preliminary results, with the understanding that doing so constitutes "staking a claim". I can't think of a way it could work out well for anyone in the end, not even the general public, but it is hard to believe that some system couldn't be developed to allow more preliminary data to be shared earlier.
Over on the Extrasolar Visions forum (http://www.extrasolar.net/forums/viewforum.php?f=2), a poster named Jyril suggested that the Corot researchers could describe any planets they think they may have detected without identifying the star in the question.
Anyway, thank you again. I took a more-hazardous-than-usual plane ride a few days before Huygens landed, and I thought to myself "If I have to die in a plane crash, couldn't it be after I hear about Titan?". I'll travel this vacation season content in knowing (or at least believing) that no stupendously amazing astronomy announcement is only days away!
Great blog here! :-)
I am Rui Borges from the spacEurope blog.
I was just informed by Malcolm Fridlund that the press conference will take place on the 20th and it will cover different aspects being one of these the first 3 papers submitted.
Well, there is a discovery based priority system in astronomy: the International Astronomical Union Circulars, and related systems like MPEC and GCN.
However, the point of those is to get the co-ordinates of the objects out quickly for new discoveries to expedite confirmation and followups. IAUCs and such like are citable, unless explicitly tagged as not-citable, and this is generally honoured.
There have been some instances of "scooping", including a couple of well publicised incidents, but for the most part this system is honoured, it is a small field and people know what is what for the most part.
I can only recall one publication where data was published on an object but the co-ordinates not published - it was unusual enough that I wrote the editor and objected.
The authors wanted to both publish and keep the object hidden until they had HST followup. Very naughty.