Today Megan Bedell (Flatiron) and I had a telecon with the Terra Hunting Experiment team to discuss target selection. The idea is to use existing good data to choose a small set of (40-ish) stars to study for ten years. That's ambitious, which is (of course) why I love it! But how to select these stars? Our big argument today was about magnetic activity, which has some interesting properties. One is that it generally declines with age, so maybe we could just choose the stars to be not-young? Another is that there are activity cycles, so determination of low activity now might not guarantee low activity over the next decade.
One thing this caused me to ask (inside my head, that is) was: If you know that activity varies over time with some stochastic time scales, and if you need to be observing only low-activity stars, what does this imply for an adaptive observing program? That's a very nice question in experimental design. I smell the multi-armed bandit coming around the corner.
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