2. What is BLENDER software?
I don’t know a lot of details, but BLENDER was created to rigorously rule out false positives, by comparing the observed light curve with theoretical light curves of various conditions that might be false positives, the main type being a binary star (two stars orbiting each other) that appears very close to the star under observation, and masquerading as a planet due to similarity in shape of light curve produced.

My bad — I only saw the group of you onscreen and was unaware of other people commenting on the talk as it was happening. I don’t use G+; their hostility towards pseudonymity and inconsistent enforcement of “real names” effectively disadvantages already vulnerable groups (like battered women and political dissidents in tyrannical states). I refuse to participate in such a service.

But that’s beside the point here. I was attempting to point out alternatives and why they might be better, but I guess they’re not better, so never mind.

Gautier’s talk is located at session C

& also :

@7. dcsohl :

Messier Tidy Upper@3: If you go to the Kepler Input Catalog search page, you can search for Kepler-20 by its KIC ID of 6850504. The search results tell me it has a surface temperature of 5342 Kelvins, which is consistent with a spectral class of G9 V or K0 V … somewhere right around there.

Thanks for that both of you – very much appreciated.

The search results also give a radius of 70% of our own Sun, which is not consistent with a G9 V spectral class. But I’d be far more confident in the temperature estimation than in the radius. Or maybe there’s something odd about the star… but the temperature is still the leading indicator of these things.

Could that be related to that stars age and evolution given that main-sequence stars gradually become more luminous and perhaps larger over time? Our Sun was once only about two-thirds of its current brightness (eg. Cambrian “faint sun paradox” ) but, I think, was still classed as a G2 V star at that time. Or was it?

Note also that Alpha Centauri A shares our Sun’s spectral class yet is significantly larger and brighter than our Sun is.

Alternatively, is Kepler 20 affected by having unusual metallicity composition?

*****

“Our Sun’s brightness is gradually increasing by about 10 % every billion years.”
– McNab, David & Younger, James, ‘The Planets’, BBC Worldwide,1999. / “The Planets” final episode – ‘Destiny” , BBC TV, screened circa 1995-2005 in Australia.

Surprised none of you had heard of BLENDER – the Kepler team have published quite a bit on it, and several of the previous discoveries (e.g. 10c, 11g) used it.

Good work to Fraser for putting it all together. I Fraser was camera shy or something. Hopefully, Google can fix the feature and allow Hangout to cycle through all the web cams.

So the Hangout we did yesterday was “On Air”, which allowed hundreds of people to watch the live stream as we did it. People were commenting and chatting as the video was happening.

Although other tools like Buzzumi are cool, I think we’re going to keep using the Google option because it integrates so well with the other services we use, like Youtube.

I don’t understand the “plebes” comment. We’ve had non-stop participation in our Google+ Hangouts. Now that we have Hangouts on Air capability, everyone can at least watch and comment.

I’ve recently, however, become aware of a new service called Buzzumi that allows exactly the sort of thing that #12 has in mind. They have four different “chat” formats, one of which, “Interview” is described as “You and up to one hundred guests. Everyone can chat via text; only you and guests you select have video and audio.” I do not know if there is any option to record the chat for later.

I’m not a Buzzumi employee nor have I even used the service, so all this should be taken with a grain of salt. But there are a lot of options out there besides G+ Hangouts that don’t require participation in the Google Empire, and can enable some of us plebs to participate as well.