 I think without further ado I'm very happy to introduce our first speaker who will be James Davenport. We're speaking about searching for activity cycles using stellar players. My newest resolution is to try new things or to try things that I've done in new ways. And so I want to try and experiment if you will all permit me. Will you play along? Yes. Okay, good. I'm going to do this without slides. This may be a wonderful train wreck, feel free to tell me. The sun and some like stars are not constant in time. This is good because this gives us job security, right? So a lot of us spend our lives studying these processes that cause stars to not be constant, to change in time. So stars move, stars age, stars rotate, stars flare, right? Stars are not constant in time, remember this all. The sun has lots of these processes and one that has fascinated me for a long time is the activity cycle. So this is, if you don't know, many of you do know, this is a roughly 11 year periodicity that we've traced back now hundreds of years, thanks to star spots, sun spots, thanks to records of sun spots that go back hundreds of years, this 11 year cycle of active maximum and active minimum where the sun is changing, right? Day to day it is a different star. This process is one of the triumphs of understanding stellar magnetism and stellar interiors, trying to explain why 11 years, how it operates, what governs it. And it's very difficult to detect on other stars. So historically we have looked spectroscopically at other stars, looking at like chromospheric emission features which require really expensive spectra, even in the era of multi-fiber spectroscopy, you need high-resolution spectra and you need a long time, right? It's an 11 year cycle, you need to wait, well, at least 11 years to see one full cycle. So this has not been done for very many stars historically. There are other indicators like sun spots, but up until recently they haven't been detectable. You need an incredible precision. The sun doesn't change in its total brightness very much from active maximum to active minimum. So this is a very difficult signal to detect. My thesis here of this talk is that I think stellar flares offer a novel and underutilized opportunity for detecting this activity cycle. So on the sun flair rates or flair power, however, whatever metric you want to use, changes between a factor of 100 or 10, depending on which sort of factor you use. It's like a factor of 100 difference between activity maximum and activity minimum. This makes flares one of the largest amplitude signals that you can use to trace the activity cycle. What's great about flares also is they're pretty unambiguous. You can just watch the star and count them. I mean it's a little harder than that, but effectively in this era of exoplanet photometry, permissions like Kepler and Tess, you can just watch them month by month, year by year, and count the flares. And if they change, then you've got an activity cycle. You've got a candidate for an activity cycle. And what's great about missions like Tess is they are continuing to operate. We're in our seventh year of Tess now starting this year. This gives us this long baseline, start looking for long term variations in the activity cycle or in the stellar magnetism. And so this is what our project is doing. As you can see in this figure, it's early days in this project. So next year when I come back, I'll have lots of figures to show you. But what we are finding, month to month variations, short term variations that we don't see on the sun, a star will have lots of flares one month and almost no flares another month. And signs of long term coherent changes in flare rates, like we see on the sun, where it slowly evolves month to month over many years. So we have lots of good candidates here that I'm excited to share with you next year. OK, so we've got one minute. OK, I've got a minute. Perfect, good. So in my last minute-ish of this talk, I want to use this as a call to action or an invitation for you to join me in this nearest resolution to look for new things or to change the way we're looking at things. So I'm excited about stellar flares because I've been working on flares and surveys like Kepler and Tess for a long time. But Kepler launched 15 years ago, and you know, RIP Kepler. It's been dead for a long time as well. But Tess is now entering its seventh year. Next year, Gaia is going to release of order a billion Tess quality light curves over almost a decade timescale. We are right now in the midst of a totally new kind of revolution of data for stars, which is precision, long term light curves for stars, which is a totally new thing we've never had. The last decade has seen a transformation of understanding of pulsations and rotation and all these things. Now we can go back and look for changes. So what are these other long term processes, these decade timescale processes that are totally new we've never seen? And what are the ones that we think we understand, but if we revisit them, have changed? Because stars are not constant in time. Thank you very much. Thank you. I did actually write a talk. There are like 14 slides here. I'm not just being a jerk.