Cool Stars 14 - Submitted Abstract # 320 This version created on 05 October 2006 Mining the next generation of surveys for cool star science David Pinfield, Centre for Astrophysics Research, University of Hertfordshire Mike Liu, Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii Hugh Jones, Centre for Astrophysics Research, University of Hertfordshire 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 GALEX, UKIDSS, and WISE will provide the community with multi-band UV-midIR wide-field imaging across much of the sky, and other new facilities such as Pan-STARRS, and SuperWASP (as well as GALEX) 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 proposed splinter session would be structured into three main sections: A series of invited talks on cool star science with large-scale datasets generated by GALEX, SuperWASP, Pan-STARRS, UKIDSS and WISE. A 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. website: http://star-www.herts.ac.uk/~dpi/cs14_splinter/splinter.html Invited contributions: SuperWASP Speaker: Rachel Street The science motivating the SuperWASP project is driven by, but not limited to, the search for transiting extra-solar planets. Two dedicated robotic observing stations, in La Palma and South Africa, host a complement of 8 wide field (7.8 x 7.8 deg) cameras each and image a 487 sq deg area of sky in every exposure. A two-pronged observing strategy ensures high cadence 'stare' imaging of ~12 selected fields throughout every clear night while 'tile mode' observations provide data covering the whole sky once a night. I will discuss the potential of the extensive photometric database derived from these data, and address some of the issues associated with it, concluding with a summary of our results to date. UKIDSS Speaker: David Pinfield The UK Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS) is the next generation near-infrared sky survey, and successor to 2MASS. It consists of 5 separate sub-surveys, each using a combination of the ZYJHK pass bands. The full project goal is to survey 7500 square degrees of the northern and equatorial sky. The survey instrument is WFCAM on the UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii, which has four 2048x2048 arrays, a pixel scale of 0.4 arcsec, and covers 0.21 sq. degs at once. In this talk I will focus mainly on the UKIDSS Large Area Survey (LAS), which plans to cover 4000 sq degs of Sloan sky to depths approximately three magnitudes deeper than 2MASS. In the much larger survey volume we expect to probe lower Teff extremes, lower masses, and older low-mass stars and brown dwarfs, as well as finding much larger numbers of previously known populations. These larger samples should yield a cull of particularly interesting low-mass objects that could shed new light on our understanding of cool star and brown dwarf atmospheres. Since UKIDSS began in May 2005 there have been two data releases, and there are third and fourth releases due early next year. These will take LAS coverage up to about 1000 sq degs. I will summarise some early discoveries from the first two releases, and present predictions of interesting populations of "benchmark objects" (ie cool stars and brown dwarfs whose properties are, by some means, well constrained) that could be identified in the future. These benchmark objects should allow us to improve our understanding of cool star and brown dwarf atmospheres, and help place constraints on the mass-age distribution of the low-mass disk population. WISE Speaker: J. Davy Kirkpatrick The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) is a MIDEX mission to map the entire sky in four infrared bandpasses - 3.3, 4.7, 12, and 23 microns (um). The 7-month mission will use a 40-cm telescope and four-channel imager equipped with HgCdTe and Si:As 1024x1024 arrays to survey the sky from a circular orbit 500-km above the Earth. Launch is expected in November, 2009. Sensitivities will be half a million times that of COBE/DIRBE at 3.3 and 4.7 um and five hundred times that of IRAS at 12 and 23 um. WISE will be particularly sensitive to brown dwarfs cooler than those presently known since deep absorption in the methane fundamental band at 3.3 um and a predicted 5-um overluminosity will produce uniquely red 3.3-to-4.7 um colors. For a limiting volume of 25 pc, WISE will completely inventory the Solar Neighborhood for brown dwarfs as cool as 1000K. At 10 pc, the census will be complete to 500K. Assuming a field mass function with alpha=1, there could be one or more brown dwarfs warmer than 150K lying closer to the Sun than Proxima Centauri and detectable primarily at WISE wavelengths. WISE will be able to provide definitive estimates of the brown dwarf mass and luminosity functions and will enable a host of candidate targets for follow-up by the Spitzer post-cryo mission and the James Webb Space Telescope. The Pan-STARRS View on the Extended Solar Neighborhood Speaker: Eugene Magnier, K.C. Chambers, N. Kaiser for the Pan-STARRS Team UH IfA / Pan-STARRS The Pan-STARRS 1 Telescope (PS1), nearing completion on Haleakala on the island of Maui in Hawaii, will begin survey operations in 2007. PS1 will perform several complementary optical and near-infrared surveys, including the 3 pi Survey which will repeatedly observe the sky north of -30 degrees in five filters: grizy. The photometric accuracy of this survey (10 millimags) and especially the astrometric accuracy (10 milliarcsec) will allow an unparallel census of the nearest 100 pc. The PS1 Telescope will observe the full 3 pi steradians 12 times in each of the 5 filters over the 3 year mission, yielding parallax detections for all stellar objects within roughly 100 pc, and proper-motion measurements for objects substantially more distant. When coupled with the substantial throughput of the camera at 1 micron, this survey will discover hundreds of T dwards and thousands of L dwarfs, and will enable a wide variety of studies of the cool stars in the extended solar neighborhood. ----------------------------------