On 17 June 2026, ESO will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Fellowship Programme with events in Garching and Vitacura. The Director General, the Director for Science, and Fellows from across the years will come together to share memories, revisit moments and anecdotes, and reflect on the experiences that have shaped ESO from within.

The 2025 Chesneau prize for the best PhD thesis in High Angular Resolution Astrophysics has been awarded to two outstanding young researchers: Dr. Violeta Gamez Rosas (left image) and Dr. Manon Lallement (right image). Violeta Gamez Rosas is awarded the prize for her ground breaking observations and astrophysical results on the Active Galactic Nucleus NGC1068 with VLTI/MATISSE, VLTI/GRAVITY and ALMA, as featured in a previous ESO press release in 2022. Manon Lallement is awarded the prize for the development of the FIRST-PL instrument at the Subaru Telescope, using photonic lanterns, as well as the first astrophysical results she obtained using this instrument.

Observations with the VLT, VLTI, and ALMA have pioneered exoplanet science over the past decade. With upcoming results from ESA missions such as Gaia, PLATO, and Ariel, exoplanet research is entering a transformative era of population-scale characterisation surveys. This workshop will bring the community together to explore how current ESO facilities together with powerful archival resources, can best complement exoplanet demographics, atmospheres, and planet formation at the dawn of population-scale studies.

ESO is delighted to announce the upcoming conference Illuminating the Active Universe: Multi-Wavelength and Multi-Messenger Insights into AGN. The conference will be held from in Garching on 14-17 September 2026, on the occasion of the retirement of Paolo Padovani (ESO). It will examine the evolution of Active Galactic Nuclei research from early work on unified schemes of radio-loud sources and BL Lac samples to recent developments in multi-wavelength surveys and multi-messenger observations. 

The second release of SPHERE (Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch instrument) data processed by the High-Contrast Data Centre (HC-DC) is now available in the ESO Science Archive Facility. SPHERE is designed for high-contrast imaging, low-resolution spectroscopy, and polarimetric characterisation of extrasolar planetary systems. This release provides reduced IRDIS imaging data acquired between ESO Periods P95 and P109 (April 2015 – September 2022), including SPHERE consortium Guaranteed Time Observations.

As part of the "VLT beyond 2030" process, ESO is issuing a call for white papers for new instruments for VLT/I, with a deadline of 15 January 2027. The process, which began with a conference for which the slides are now available, aims to keep the VLT/I at the forefront of astrophysical research in the coming decades. This is distinct from the Expanding Horizons effort, whose goal is to select the next facility after the ELT.

ALMA is pleased to announce that, for the Cycle 13 Call for Proposals, a web-based interface of the ALMA Observing Tool (OT) will replace the previously used desktop-based OT. The web-based OT offers the same functionality as the desktop-based OT. The new interface offers a modernized and optimized view while retaining the same familiar workflow and structure. Proposal drafts will now be automatically saved within the system, without the need to save local files.

The first data release of Band 2 Science Verification data observed on November 2025 are now available on the ALMA Science Portal. The data release consists of the following targets: G31.41+0.31 (spectral scan in Band 2), SPT 0027-50 (spectral scan in Band 2), HR 5907 (full polarization in Band 2).

ESO's Expanding Horizons process aims to identify the main scientific challenges that will face European astronomers in the 2040s, and the type of transformational ground-based facility that will be required to address these fundamental questions. Following the call for Scientific White Papers in late 2025 -an initiative designed to galvanise the European astronomical community to engage in the Expanding Horizons process- ESO is organizing a community-wide workshop on 13-17 July 2026 at ESO's Headquarters in Garching bei München that will bring together astronomers from a wide range of research backgrounds to present their vision of what the key scientific questions will be 2040s. It will also be a platform to investigate the potential synergies between the different scientific themes, the required facilities and the key enabling technologies needed for the 2040s and beyond.

The Users Committee (UC) represents ESO's astronomical community at large and acts as an advisory body to the ESO Director General on matters related to the performance, scientific access, operation and data management facilities to the La Silla Paranal Observatory and ALMA. The 50th annual meeting of the UC is scheduled on 27 and 28 April 2026. During the UC meeting updates from ESO and feedback from the user community are exchanged and openly discussed. Each year one topic is explored in more detail and this year the Special Topic session is dedicated to Time Domain: Target of Opportunity and Rapid Response Mode Observations.