A telescope monitoring the starlight will thus see it blinking. The probability of such occultation events is so low that it will be necessary to conduct 100 billion measurements per year in order to detect the ten to four thousand such occultation events expected. Thus, foremost among the statistical problems is the necessity of developing methods to detect very rare, faint events in very large quantities of data. Large numbers of such light curves are becoming available from large scale sky surveys. Some pictures and further information can be found here .
Modern astronomy provides many fascinating opportunities and challenges for statistical research.
I am on the Scientific Advisory Board of a conference, Statistical Challenges in Modern Astronomy III to be held in the summer of 2001 at Penn State. Short term travel time predicting using a time-varying coefficient linear model. A simple and effective method of predicting travel times on freeways. Nonparametric estimation of a periodic function. Biometrika 87, 545-557.