Why wasn't this found before?
Surely 'take all observations of the sky and for every visible star do a frequency analysis' is step 1 when looking for planets?
Surely 'take all observations of the sky and for every visible star do a frequency analysis' is step 1 when looking for planets?
The other answers: "Of course not, someone would haved picked it up already if it were"
Some times low hanging fruit is so low hanging that people don't bother to look for it as it's "obvious" someone else would had picked it already.
“I’ll pay you $100 if you eat that dog shit” says one
The other economist, being a rational actor, naturally eats the dog shit. He is given the $100.
But then he sees another dog shit. “Well, I’ll pay you $100 to eat that one!”
A second shit is consumed, producing $200 of GDP. The economists are overjoyed at their productivity and earnings.
Or you can see it as a very basic representation of money flowing in the opposite way of services and goods in the economy, you can even measure the speed of money with the amount of shit they make each other eat in an afternoon.
To put that in perspective, the total daily internet traffic ranges between 25-35 exabytes per day. If you fraction that to the ten hours a telescope would operate SKA-Low could double the amount of data transmitted globally on the web while it's recording
I suppose you have to set a cutoff somewhere.
When I last did astrophysics research half a decade ago (as an undergrad) the workflow for doing research boiled down to writing pipelines to clean the data and then have scripts to find interesting candidates and analyse them automatically. It was necessary to filter stuff to reduce false positives, so it's possible this candidate was just missed by such scripts.
It's also possible this star is in some PhD student's dataset and they just haven't published yet. Astrophysics papers in this vein usually focus on techniques for classification and data science so you'd expect to have at least dozens if not hundreds to thousands of interesting stellar objects before you have something worth publishing unless it was some truly novel technique. A paper just saying "we found an exoplanet" isn't particularly interesting these days, as it turns out there are a lot of them.
(I haven't looked at the data and I'm sure my skills have atrophied by now anyway, sadly.)
More power to the guy who did this (astrophysics is probably the most hobbyist-friendly science since a lot of the data is public and the only lab equipment you need is a laptop) but I suspect "ordinary" folks are far more impressed by this than astrophysics folks. A decade or two ago exoplanets were still thought to be very rare but we've since figured out they are quite common and have moved on to cataloguing them.