Splinter session objectives

Mining the next generation of surveys for cool star science

Cool star science will benefit greatly in the near future from a variety of major new surveys that are just commencing, or about to start in the next few years. These surveys will have a large and broad impact both on cool star science, and the way cool star science is done. This splinter session is designed to educate the larger community about the survey resources soon to become widely available, and how these will change the field of cool stars.

New surveys such as Pan-STARRS, UKIDSS, and WISE will provide the community with multi-band optical-midIR wide-field imaging across much of the sky, and other new facilities including SuperWASP as well as Pan-STARRS, will explore time-domain science for cool stars.

These new facilities will allow extensive study of a large range of cool star phenomena, from very hot and violent coronal/flare activity, to extremely cool brown dwarfs with temperatures approaching the planetary regime. Time domain data will reveal information about cool stars in multiple systems and their fundamental properties (via the transit method), as well as the variability intrinsic to individual cool stars. Also, proper motion and parallax will become increasingly powerful discovery tools in some time domain surveys.

It is important that the cool star community is aware of these new capabilities, in order to take advantage of them in the most effective way. To this end, our splinter session is structured into three main sections:

• A series of invited talks on cool star science with large-scale datasets generated by SuperWASP, Pan-STARRS, UKIDSS and WISE.
• A smaller number of contributed talks focusing on new cool star research that is or will soon be exploiting large scale survey facilities.
• The session will close with a summary/perspective, involving audience discussion about the impact of new surveys on cool star science.