Re: Wild Speculation

[Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

Richard,

Thank you.   Do you know if the Ap.J. is available to me on line?  I can 
always go into Fermilab to read it.

Hmmm!  I have 22 star years of observations and I see a few.  So they would 
have to happen more than once a century per star to match what I see.

Tom

At 09:12 PM 5/19/03 +0100, you wrote:
>Tom,
>
>Some input.
>Brad Schaefer published a paper in the Astrophysical Journal (Ap.J. 337,
>927-933, 1989 Feb 15) entitled "Flashes from Normal Stars".
>That was some 14 years ago and I'm not sure what happened subsequently as I
>haven't done any literature search on the subject but it was certainly a
>thought-provoking paper and well worth a read.  How did the astronomical
>community react to Schaefer's suggestion??
>
>In that paper, two mechanisms were considered to explain the observed
>phenomena :
>One involved the reconnection of a star's magnetic field' - i.e. where a
>large part of the energy stored in a star's magnetic field is released.
>The second involved the impact of an asteroid (or comet) onto an unobserved
>white dwarf companion.
>
>(Not sure why a white dwarf has to be postulated here - I would have thought
>that impacts by massive comets or planetesimals loose in interstellar space
>could also be considered).  The frequency rate estimated was of the order of
>once per century per normal field star.
>
>I tend to favour the comet / minor planet / planetesimal impact as our
>knowledge of these bodies is very sketchy and there may be some regions in
>our galaxy where the equivalent 'Oort Clouds' are relatively highly
>populated with large bodies so we can't use our Sun as a typical example.
>Indeed, that life evolved here may be evidence that our circumsolar
>environment is atypical.
>
>Hope this helps.
>Maybe others may have another angle on this.
>
>Cheers,
>Richard Miles
>
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>
>To: <tass@listserv.wwa.com>
>Sent: Monday, May 19, 2003 11:55 AM
>Subject: Wild Speculation
>
>
> > First, I am encouraged that the data is picking up real asteroid crossings
> > of stars in the data base.  This gives me some confidence in the data.  No
> > doubt we could track this asteroid (and others) with the single hit data.
> >
> > So far, we have a sample of two.  One is an asteroid, the other is
> > unknown.  Is anyone interested in looking at more examples?
> >
> > I could search the data for stars that have 10 or more measurements with
> > one or more high points.  My dumb approach would be to compute sigma for
> > the measurements of each star and then look for 5 sigma high points.  I
> > could probably do this in a couple of days.  My guess from manually paging
> > through the data is that I might get a couple of hundred objects from my 2
> > million star list.
> >
> > Would anyone want to work on this data set if I make it?
> >
> > Even better, does someone want to write a perl script that will process
>the
> > data file and output a string or interesting star measurements?  I can do
> > this, but it will take me a few days.   I suspect that most of you can
>dash
> > it off in 10 minutes.   OK, the actual file that I have is called
> > collected.t and is the result of merging the .cal files, sorting, removing
> > flagged entries and processing the result through collect_stars.pl.
> >
> > In a spirit of fun, I will give the first person who sends me a working
> > perl script a week head start on the resulting data.  Send me a script, I
> > will send you a data set.  It should be small enough that I can just
>attach
> > it to an e-mail.   I reserve the right to allow ties if I don't get back
>to
> > reading my e-mail soon enough.
> >
> > The format was presented in the post.  I will answer any questions about
> > it, but it is well defined by collect_stars.pl which is available on the
> > home page.
> >
> > Tom Droege
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >