The ALMA Director, on behalf of the Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) and the partner organizations in East Asia, Europe, and North America, announces the ALMA Early Science Cycle 3 Call for Proposals for scientific observations that will be scheduled from October 2015 to September 2016. ALMA capabilities added for Cycle 3 include Band 10, and baselines up to 10 km for Bands 3, 4 and 6. The proposal submission deadline is 15:00 UT on 23 April 2015.
Since 20 March, NACO has been unavailable on VLT Unit Telescope 1. The mechanism that controls the camera objectives suffered a connection failure and CONICA had to be warmed up in order for the problem to be fixed. Since another intervention is also planned for early April to reduce the cryostat background noise (through improved thermal shielding), NACO will only be returned to science operations after mid-April. Please check the instrument news for updates.
The K-Band Multi-Object Spectrograph (KMOS) achieved a major milestone last month with the award of Provisional Acceptance Chile (PAC). This marks the official handover of the instrument to the Observatory. A major overhaul of the KMOS robotic pickoff arms was also undertaken to eliminate the problems of premature ageing, which had been discovered during routine operations over the past 18 months.
VIDEO is a deep near-infrared survey which targets ~12 square degrees over the ELAIS-S1, XMMLSS, and ECDFS extragalactic fields, and is one of the six VISTAPublic Surveys. There are two new data releases from VIDEO: for CDFS (VIDEO-CDFS DR2) and ELAIS-S1 (VIDEO-ES1 DR2).
Scisoft is a project within ESO to provide a collection of astronomical software utilities in a uniform way at all ESO sites, and to make them available to the worldwide community. It was developed by ESO to run on Linux computers and primarily for internal use, but the collection is also freely distributed externally.
The term "Phase 3" was coined to denote the process whereby users are able to return science data products to ESO in order to make them available to the community at large through the Science Archive Facility. The upgrade of the Phase 3 system has now doubled the available storage space, allowing upload of more new science data products via Phase 3. In addition the underlying architecture has been improved in terms of performance, with the goal to ingest and make new data available in a shorter time than was possible before.
The ESO research studentship programme provides an outstanding opportunity for Ph.D. students to experience the exciting scientific environment, at one of the world's leading observatories, for a period of up to two years.
The EIROforum School of Instrumentation (ESI) is a biennial event, jointly organised by the Instrumentation Working Group of the EIROforum organisations. The fourth school (ESI 2015) will be held at ESO and EUROfusion in Garching, Germany from 15-19 June 2015.
The VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea Survey (VVV) is a wide area, near-infrared (Z, Y, J, H, Ks), multi-epoch imaging survey of the Milky Way Bulge and Disk with a total sky coverage of 540 square degrees. This new Phase 3 release (VVV DR4) contains observations up to 30 September 2013 with all approved data from CASU v1.3 pipeline reduction, and includes images and single-band source catalogues. It replaces the previous releases that had been processed with previous pipeline versions and adds a large amount of new data, mainly increasing the number of epochs for the Ks band.
The ESO ALMA Regional Centre (ARC) will organise another Community Days workshop in order to optimally prepare the European astronomical community for ALMA Cycle 3. The 2015 Community Days will focus on the practical aspects of proposal preparation as well as hands-on tutorials for the ALMA Observing Tool and the Simulators. These will enable novice and advanced users alike to create observing projects making full use of ALMA's scientific capabilities in Cycle 3. Further information can be found here.
Satellite galaxies, streams and the star cluster – dwarf galaxy interface are inter-related. Galactic satellites and streams should be regarded together – satellites result from low-mass substructures while tidal streams trace the disruption of these substructures by the host's gravitational potential. Both contribute to the assembly of the host galaxy and provide a unique opportunity to test and improve our understanding of structure formation at small and large scales. This workshop aims to bring together experts from both fields to explore the bigger picture. More details can be found on the workshop webpage; registration has closed.
Despite the huge difference in spatial resolution, Herschel sources provide ideal targets for ALMA follow-up. The workshop will focus on ALMA/Herschel scientific synergies and archival research with both archives. Mutual awareness of Herschel and ALMA data archive contents will be promoted with: science cases, covering a broad range of astrophysical topics; the exploration and visualization of Herschel and ALMA data products; and assistance to users in the preparation of Cycle 3 ALMA proposals based on existing Herschel data. For more details, please refer to the workshop webpage.
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 or by email. The deadline for abstract submission is 6 April 2015.
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.
