CoRoT Communiqué n° 2     July 20th

CoRoT has now been for 555 days orbiting around the Earth and everything is going well onboard.

The third long observation, which has started on   April 14th, is continuing and will end in september 9th, after  almost 150 days of continuous pointing.
In autumn,  the programmme will continue with two shorter sessions of approximately 25 days each.

In the mean time new data are being released to the scientists at the end of this month, corresponding to the observations of last winter.

The analysis of the data of the programme of seismology  is speeding up. 
The scientists have presented  the first results
in several international conferences, as for instance in Phuket (Thailand.), in Wroclaw (Poland) and in Liège (Belgium).
The quality of the data and the newness of the results have impressed the audiences, and excitation is growing among the specialists.
Some guesses about theoretical interpretations start to be discussed. 

Let's for instance cite
	- the discovery of oscillations in all the stars which resemble the Sun, as expected but with different amplitudes, which question the present representation of the energy exchanges
	- The clear measurement of oscillations in tens of faint giant stars comes as a wonderfull confirmation of hopes motivated by the few previous detections (less than 10) established mostly from the ground and set the stage for the development of this specific field.
		For the brightest ones, CoRoT has detected very low frequency coherent  pulsations, which will allow to probe the structure of the internal layers.
	- In many stars we are now able to measure the period of rotation, and try tro understand their evolution. Before, only an upper limit was accessible through a measurement of a projected rotation velocity .
	- The total number of stars observed reaches now more than 50 000. Automatic tools are then necessary to analyse such a large set of light curves.
At least half of the stars have measurable variations.  These variations are being classified, using a learning machine,  and if some have an already known behavior, others  look quite wierd.