In article ,
OM om@our_blessed_lady_mary_of_the_holy_NASA_researc h_facility.org wrote:
...This year's been one excellent one with
regards to unmanned space exploration, what with the MERs, Stardust,
MOST, SMART-1, and now Cassini...

And speaking of MOST, the first paper has indeed finally seen publication
in the 1 July Nature.

MOST spent, roughly, January staring at Procyon. It was a prime target
partly because there have already been some tentative observations of
oscillations using radial-velocity measurements from ground observatories.
And what MOST found when it looked for brightness oscillations was...
nothing! *No detectable oscillations at all.*

The hardware is working. The paper includes a nice plot of brightness
changes seen in a nearby star that happened to be within the field of view
and got designated as a secondary science target; it turns out to be
mildly variable on two different time scales. Procyon doesn't do anything
like that -- its curve just looks like a flat strip of noise at first
glance -- but when it's cranked through an analysis looking for dominant
frequencies, quite unexpectedly, nothing comes out.

Nobody knows what this means. Maybe the oscillations just aren't there.
Maybe they exist but are very short-lived, so they don't show up well.
Maybe the random noise in the brightness has different characteristics
than expected and it's swamping the oscillations. (Any of these means
that something is wrong with the Sun-based models used to predict the
observability of oscillations.) Maybe there is some subtle noise source
messing up the data (but what?).

As usual, the first look at the world using a new method came up with
results nobody expected...
--
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert |