The latest edition of ESO's quarterly journal, The Messenger, is now available online. In this Issue 183 our readers will find a summary of ESO’s Strategy for the 2020s, learn about the prospects for future exoplanet imaging based on high-precision astrometric studies with VLT/SPHERE, as well as explore the low-surface brightness regime of galaxies thanks to the VST Early-type GAlaxy Survey (VEGAS).
Over the past several weeks, ALMA has continued to conduct PI science observations on a best-effort basis while the recovery of the Arrays has been ongoing. The first set of antenna relocations was completed on May 10, 2021, moving the 12-m Array into the C43-6 configuration. In addition, PI science using eight antennas on the 7-m Array began on May 18, 2021. The plan is to go through all remaining configurations (C43-7 to C43-10) by the end of Cycle 7, although for a shorter duration than originally planned for each configuration.
Since 2020 the ESO Cosmic Duologue series has aimed to cover the biggest questions in astronomy in a lively way. For each duologue, ESO invites two speakers to give short, dynamic talks, presenting their side of a challenging scientific topic or related to the sociology of science. Following on from the talks, the speakers debate the topic further, with the help of a moderator, and answer questions from the audience. The duologues are streamed live on a dedicated YouTube channel. The links to the videos of all past events can be found here. We invite all astronomers from the community, at any stage of their career, to propose a topic, a list of potential speakers and moderator(s) for the new series, planned for October 2021 through January 2022.
A detailed report of the Cycle 8 2021 Proposal Submission Statistics is now available. The report provides a summary of items such as the number of submitted proposals and time requested, subscription rates, and comparisons with the number of hours requested in previous Cycles.
ESO will soon deploy the new helpdesk software Deskpro to handle questions and support requests coming from the user community. Starting on July 5th, 2021 a new website, https://support.eso.org, will be available for all the users of ESO services, offering a knowledgebase as well as a contact form to request support.
ESO is organising the third part of the 2020/2021 La Silla Paranal Users Workshop. This year, the workshop consists of a series of online events, the first of which took place in early September 2020, followed by a second event in March 2021. At the end of July, just after the publication of the time allocation for P108, ESO will (virtually) host the third part of the workshop, focussed on the preparation and submission process of the Phase 2 material, the observing blocks.
The AMBRE collaboration between the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur (OCA, Nice) and ESO has the goal to analyse the wealth of stellar spectroscopic data in the ESO science archive using the MATISSE parametrisation algorithm to derive stellar atmospheric parameters (Recio-Blanco et al., 2006, Worley et al. 2012, de Laverny et al. 2012). This data release provides stellar radial velocity, effective temperature, surface gravity, mean metallicity and enrichment in alpha-elements for about 6600 stellar objects observed between March 2000 and November 2010 using the VLT/UVES spectrograph.
It is a great pleasure for me to congratulate, on behalf of the entire ESO community, former Director General Catherine Cesarsky (1999-2007) on the occasion of the 50 years since her PhD defense. This marked the beginning of a career of outstanding scientific achievements and leading contributions to the development of world-class astronomical observatories. Her period as ESO Director General saw the development of Paranal from early operations into a mature observatory, the beginning of ALMA construction, and the definition of the ELT project, to name just a few of the transformational highlights achieved by ESO under her leadership. Also during this period, five new Member States joined ESO. I am pleased to invite ESO’s community to join the online conference being organized by the French Commission for Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies (CEA), which will take place on 14 and 15 June 2021, to celebrate Catherine Cesarsky’s career thus far.
The 2021 Olivier Chesneau Prize has been awarded to Mathias Nowak for his doctoral work entitled: "The 2017 conjunction of Beta Pictoris b: the Life and Death of PicSat, followed by a VLTI/GRAVITY observation of the re-emergence" that was successfully defended in 2019 at the Observatoire de Paris.
MAVIS (MCAO Assisted Visible Imager and Spectrograph) is a forthcoming facility instrument for the ESO’s VLT AOF (Adaptive Optics Facility, UT4 Yepun) currently starting Phase B. With its unique parameter space, MAVIS is foreseen to cover broad science cases, from solar system objects to high redshift galaxies, as highlighted in the current MAVIS Science Case. This workshop aims at bringing together the scientific community and discussing the key science cases where MAVIS will have a strong impact due to its unparalleled capabilities, as well as identifying the areas where it will provide unique synergies with existing and forthcoming facilities such as ELTs and JWST. The workshop is an opportunity to engage the community and push forward the MAVIS project.
The goal of GALACTICNUCLEUS survey (ESO Large Programme 195.B-0283, PI Rainer Schödel) is to build a single-epoch, high angular resolution (0.2”) source catalogue of the Galactic Centre in the near infrared band J,H,Ks. Data were acquired with HAWK-I between June 2015 and June 2018. They covered seven regions spread over the nuclear stellar disk, the inner Galactic bulge and the transition region between them, for a total area covered of about 0.3 deg2. The final catalogue includes accurate PSF photometry for 3.3x106 stars. The 5-sigma limiting AB magnitude for the different NIR bands are J~22, H~21 and Ks~21. The released catalogue also provides absolute coordinates for all the sources.
ESPRESSO is a highly-stabilised fibre-fed echelle spectrograph that can be fed with light from either a single or up to four Unit Telescopes simultaneously. It is installed at the incoherent combined Coudé facility of the VLT. Nearly 2000 spectra obtained in all instrumental modes (HR, UHR, and MR) from the start of operations until March 2020 are now published via the ESO archive. The data consist of extracted, wavelength-calibrated and flux-calibrated 1-dimensional spectra with merged echelle orders. If several exposures on the same target are executed within the same observing template, the extracted and flux-calibrated spectra of the single exposures are combined into a co-added spectrum with increased signal-to-noise ratio. The combined spectrum becomes the primary product, while the single spectra are made available as associated files. The reduced science spectra come with an associated set of ancillary information which are described in detail in the accompanying release description.
Proto-clusters, high redshift galaxy clusters, and merging clusters represent the initial stages in the formation of largest gravitationally-bound structures in the Universe. Forming via mergers and accretion, (proto-)cluster assembly has a decisive impact on their subsequent evolution, and is thus an important process to understand. The aim of GCF2021 is to discuss cluster formation over the last roughly ten billion years, from its beginnings to the present day, with a particular focus on the progress and developments since the first GCF meeting in 2017.
The Detector Modelling workshop aims to bring together the community of scientists and engineers who are interested in modelling of detector effects for astronomy. The workshop will be held online on 14th-16th June 2021 in the afternoons (CET). The workshop is being organised by the Pyxel detector simulation framework developers based at ESO and ESA. The days are organised around blocks of contributed talks from the community covering a range of topics related to detector modelling as well as tutorial sections on using Pyxel.
MAVIS (MCAO Assisted Visible Imager and Spectrograph) is a forthcoming facility instrument for the ESO’s VLT AOF (Adaptive Optics Facility, UT4 Yepun) currently starting Phase B. With its unique parameter space, MAVIS is foreseen to cover broad science cases, from solar system objects to high redshift galaxies, as highlighted in the current MAVIS Science Case. This workshop aims at bringing together the scientific community and discussing the key science cases where MAVIS will have a strong impact due to its unparalleled capabilities, as well as identifying the areas where it will provide unique synergies with existing and forthcoming facilities such as ELTs and JWST. The workshop is an opportunity to engage the community and push forward the MAVIS project.
The forthcoming generation of Extremely Large Telescope (ELTs) will reach unprecedented spectroscopic sensitivity coupled with high angular resolution in the near infrared. This workshop will bring together the international astronomical community to explore the transformational science that the spectroscopic instrument suites of the ELTs (GMT, TMT and ELT) will achieve. High resolution simulations have played a key role in the development of the instrument science cases providing a quantifiable means to determine feasibility and to predict the scientific outcomes that can be achieved. The meeting will bring together theoreticians, modelers and observers, with interests ranging from exoplanets to cosmology, and it will set the stage for the community to plan and coordinate ELT science programmes and pre-cursor observations, making use of quantitative estimates of what the ELTs can achieve.
The vision for ALMA's future development is described in the ALMA Development Roadmap. In order to implement this vision a series of three workshops has been envisioned, in conjunction with corresponding working groups defining the appropriate scientific and technical specifications. Following the first two workshops held in 2020 to discuss potential correlator and digitizer upgrades that will realize the ALMA 2030 vision, we plan to complete the workshop trilogy with an ALMA Front-End Development Workshop, entitled "The ALMA 2030 Vision: A next generation of front-end receivers". This workshop will be held online, in the week of 27-30 September 2021.
The goal of this workshop is to bring together the galactic, extragalactic, and high-redshift communities, both theorists and observers, with the final goal of fostering fruitful discussions and new collaborations on the formation of the central regions of galaxies. Amongst the main topics to be discussed are: chemo-dynamical properties of the MW bulge, observed properties of bulges and link to formation scenarios, bulges in a cosmological context, clumpy discs, mergers and bulge formation at high redshifts, formation and evolution of bulges from a theoretical perspective.
