This newsletter is a summary of recent ESO Science Announcement items. Follow the links or visit ESO Science Announcements to read more.
Award of the 2015 ESO Fellowships
The ESO Offices for Science are proud to announce that 12 new post-doctoral Fellows were selected during the 2014 application round – six each for Chile and Germany. The core mission of the ESO Fellowship Programme is to train and prepare the next generation of astronomers, giving them the opportunity to consolidate their scientific profile, gain in-depth experience with state-of-the-art facilities and return to the scientific community as ESO ambassadors. Since its inception in 1977, hundreds of astronomers have participated in this programme and many have moved on to occupy leading positions at universities, observatories and laboratories around the world.
Congratulations go to:
Adriano Agnello, Fabrizio Arrigoni-Battaia, Hauyu Liu, Annalisa De Cia, Allison Man and Andra Stroe for Garching;
Bruno Dias, Alexandre Gallene, Yara Jaffé, Jorge Lillo-Box, Adele Plunkett and Frédéric Vogt for Vitacura.
The new fellows will spend three to four years at ESO, starting this year.
We are looking forward to welcoming them at ESO!
Eric Emsellem and Claudio Melo
Heads of the Offices for Science
The proposal submission for ESO Period 96 (1 October 2015 – 31 March 2016) closed on 26 March 2015. 958 proposals were received, including 27 Large Programme and 46 Target of Opportunity proposals, for a total of 2450 nights. This is some 30 proposals more than last period, but for a similar number of nights.
Two large infrastructure projects are currently taking place on Paranal. The combined Coudé room that will merge the light from the incoherent foci of the VLT is being prepared for the arrival of ESPRESSO. The other project concerns the preparation of the infrastructure of the VLT Interferometer (VLTI) for the arrival of the second generation instruments GRAVITY and MATISSE.
Phase 3 allows users to return their reduced data for publication via the ESO Science Archive Facility. The Phase 3 data format specifications and Phase 3 validator have now been extended to astrometrically registered and flux calibrated sky maps in the submillimetre domain. This format is relevant to the Phase 3 data release for the LESS extra-galactic submillimetre survey.
The User Support Department (USD) would like to thank all those Principal Investigators and their Phase 2 delegates who filled in the on-line User Satisfaction Survey. As of mid-March 2015, 140 responses were received from our targeted campaign. We have contacted, where possible, those respondents who provided detailed comments. A summary report of the latest User Satisfaction Survey is now available.
New versions of the available science pipelines have been have been released and are available here. The FORS pipeline has been upgraded and results in substantially improved extracted spectra compared to previous versions. The MUSE pipeline now comes with an ESO Reflex workflow that includes a python script for alignment of individual datasets, an essential step for deep exposures.
Reference spectra for six southern spectrophotometric standard stars observed with X-shooter are now available and the tables can be downloaded. The flux distribution over the full X-shooter range 3000 – 25000Å is tabulated.
ESO Workshop, Garching, Germany, 5 – 9 October 2015
Since the start of VLT science operations, about 15% of science time has been allocated to Large Programmes. In the last five years, the ESO Public Surveys on VISTA, VST, VLT and NTT, have vastly increased the public data delivered by La Silla Paranal telescopes. The scientific research of these Programmes and Surveys covers all areas of observational astronomy. This workshop will focus on the scientific results achieved through these programmes and the potential for enhanced exploitation of the archival data.
ESO Workshop, Garching, Germany, 30 November – 4 December 2015
The objective of this workshop is to prepare that part of the community interested in Solar System research for making the best use of the Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs). In complement to many successful space planetary missions, ground-based observations are still essential for understanding the physico-chemical properties of Solar System objects.
Spitzer, Herschel and Planck have enabled important steps forward in our understanding of the distribution and properties of dust and star formation in nearby and distant galaxies. In the near future ALMA will open a new era of studies of resolved high-redshift populations. This meeting will be the opportunity to exchange new findings from the communities studying the properties of nearby and distant galaxies. More details can be found on the workshop webpage.
Understanding the formation and evolution of galaxy groups is crucial to solving the general problem of galaxy formation, as groups contain most of the galaxies in the Universe at the present time and galaxies spend most of their life in groups before eventually entering the cluster environment. The main aims of the workshop are to review the multi-wavelenth properties of galaxy groups, probe the properties of the hot intra-group gas (primarily from X-ray data), consider the galaxy population properties from optical to far-infrared wavelengths to the radio and review the current theoretical picture of group and galaxy formation and evolution. Further information can be obtained from the workshop website.
This workshop will explore some of the first science that will emerge from the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) in the next decade. The primary spectroscopic capability of E-ELT at first light will be provided by the HARMONI instrument, a visible and near-infrared integral field spectrograph.The meeting will bring together experts spanning a wide range of observational fields, from exo-planets to cosmology, to plan for future observations with HARMONI. More details on the workshop webpage.
Mass loss from cool Asymptotic Giant Branch and Red Supergiant stars inputs large amounts of material to the ISM and is an important process for understanding stellar lifecycles and galactic ecology. Significant advances in observations (e.g. VLTI and ALMA), and theory, provide an opportunity to revisit outstanding questions of late stellar evolution, such as the role of mass loss, magnetic fields and binarity. The meeting aims to bring together observers and theorists from the low and high mass stellar communities to explore the commonalities of evolved star mass loss. Further information can be obtained from the workshop website.
The conference will cover both theory and observations of the large-scale structure of the Universe to discuss recent progress and future directions. Measuring the distribution of matter in the Universe as a function of time and space is a powerful probe of cosmology, both for gravity on scales much greater than the conventional tests of General Relativity and the origin of cosmic acceleration. Observations of the large-scale structure of the Universe, from a new generation of surveys are pushing the survey volume and redshifts, demanding improved theoretical understanding. More details can be found on the conference webpage. The registration deadline is 1 May 2015.
The workshop will consider the science from current and upcoming multi-object spectroscopy (MOS) facilities, with a focus on the important cases already limited by sensitivity and spatial resolution. The scientific topics that demand future MOS capabilities on ELTs will be reviewed. The workshop will be organized in sessions on science themes from planetary systems and stellar populations to the earliest phases of galaxy formation. There will be a special session dedicated to critical analysis of the ELT MOS facilities required in the post-JWST era to assess their complementarity and competitiveness. More details can be found on the website. Registration deadline is 15 May.
Astrobiology and Planetary Atmospheres Joint ESO, Universidad de Chile, Universidad Andrés Bello Workshop, Vitacura, Santiago, Chile, 28 September – 02 October 2015
Astrobiology has become the meeting point for astronomers, biologists, geologists, and climatologists in trying to solve the puzzle of how life originated in the Universe. The main aims of the workshop are to foster exchanges across all the major disciplines involved in the field of astrobiology, particularly those working on climatology of Solar System planets. More details can be found on the workshop webpage or by email. Abstract deadline is end June and registration deadline 1 September.
