ESO/NUVA/IAG Workshop on Challenges in UV Astronomy

ESO Garching, 7-11 October 2013

The network for UV astronomy (NUVA) has been organizing interdisciplinary meetings every three years where scientists and instrumentalists working in the UV can obtain updated information on the current status of the field. The third meeting of the NUVA will come at a crucial time in UV astronomy. The ESA/ NASA programmes that created the community are reaching completion and future missions, apart from WSO-UV, are small-class, some operating from balloons.

The advent of the 10-m class telescopes and the projects for extremely-large telescopes, such as the E-ELT, have opened the possibility to explore efficiently from the ground a fraction of the UV spectrum tht, albeit small, it is of extraordinary scientific interest. The new UV instrumentation, such as CUBES - a joint ESO-Brazil high-resolution UV spectrograph - being planned for the VLT, will grant access to some prominent atomic and molecular transitions, the Ozone jump, the Balmer jump, and the Universe at redshift (z~2) connecting the recent history of the Universe with the deep optical/ infrared surveys.

The purpose of this ESO/NUVA/IAG workshop is to bring together the international community interested in UV astronomy to discuss the present and future of the field and in particular to examine and broaden the scientific case of CUBES. Invited talks and reviews will cover the topics of UV astronomy of the Solar System, exoplanets, abundances of stars at various stages of evolution, resolved stellar populations in the Galaxy and beyond, the star-formation history of the Universe, and the properties of the diffuse interstellar and intergalactic medium near and far.

In addition, recent progress on UV detectors will be reviewed, as well as the technical possibilities opened by balloon-based experiments. The current status of research on novel coatings for the UV as well as on data bases of UV molecular transitions will be addressed.