Conny Aerts

And in practice, you know, the precision of the frequency goes as one over the total time base of the measurements.

So if Kepler measures four years, well, that's one over four years in frequency resolution, as we call it, capacity to unravel these dark wave frequencies.

So we need to be very, astro-seismologists are very patient people.

Yeah, that's right.

And so that's why we need these long time series, and we can only do the work once we achieve that.

So we need dedicated space missions to achieve that.

And James Webb is just not one of them.

Again, please leave James Webb to the people who need it, and I'm not one of them, all right?

Yeah, well, PLATO stands for Planetary Transits and Oscillations of Stars.

And PLATO is actually going to, from construction, combines the best of both worlds of the Kepler mission and the TESS mission, in the sense that we need long-term observations, but we also need the whole, not the whole sky, but a very, very big part of it, to have copies of the Earth in our line of sight that rotate around copies of the Sun.

It takes a year for us to evolve.

And so Plato has that built in.

It's actually 24 telescopes on one big platform.

Yeah, so it's a multi-telescope instrument that is being built by the European Space Agency right now.

I tend to call it my third child because I've been... You're deep involved in the design and objectives of it.

Yeah, so that's exciting.

I want to see the data before I retire.

No, well, yeah, just as long as the machinery works for us, Tacitus.

You don't care what the hell you call it.

Oh, well, the role they play is they disturb the periodic oscillations of the sun, but it's not bad for us.