First Announcement of Workshop "A Decade of Discoveries with MUSE and Beyond"

Published: 18 Jan 2024
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This is the first announcement of the ESO workshop "A decade of discoveries with MUSE and beyond", to be held at ESO-Garching between 18 and 22 November 2024.

The Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer, MUSE, mounted on the VLT-UT4, has allowed the community to go one significant step beyond. With its large field of view, broad wavelength coverage, state-of-the-art adaptive optics, and spectro-photometric capabilities, MUSE quickly became a reference instrument addressing a rich and wide range of scientific questions. Combined with the powerful adaptive optics facility, MUSE has profoundly changed the way observers think and prepare their observing programs. It has opened new avenues into a variety of science topics covering e.g., galaxy formation and evolution, the nature of the circum-galactic medium, early stellar evolution or stellar populations. This MUSE-10yrs workshop will provide the perfect opportunity to discuss past achievements, to probe synergies between integral-field spectroscopy and other existing or upcoming facilities, and most importantly to address the current and expected next challenges and to nurture potential ideas for the future.

A 4-days' workshop (Monday mid-day / Friday mid-day) is proposed to:

  1. Show-case a decade of groundbreaking scientific results, serving the ESO community at large;
  2. Bring the broad MUSE user community together to share their insights pertaining to the numerous challenges of MUSE data handling and analysis across a wide variety of scientific topics. A particular focus will be put on notoriously difficult aspects such as background subtraction, extraction of spectra in crowded fields, low surface brightness regime, LSF and PSF measurement and homogenization, astrometry or mosaicking.
  3. Reflect on the paradigm shift MUSE has triggered in the astronomical community on scientific, instrumental, and operational aspects
  4. Highlight and address existing and upcoming synergies with other major facilities such as ALMA and JWST and e.g., soon the ELT
  5. Discuss the current challenges and prospects for science supported by integral-field spectroscopy, building on the MUSE experience.

Going well beyond the 10th anniversary of MUSE, this workshop is a very timely opportunity to reflect on the many successes and challenges such an instrument triggered and further shape a community-wide science perspective and effort supported by integral-field spectroscopy.

Scientific Organizing Committee (SOC)
- Roland Bacon, Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon
- Fuyan Bian, ESO
- Jarle Brinchmann, Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço
- Shany Danieli, Princeton University
- Eric Emsellem, ESO
- Pascale Hibon, ESO
- Kirsten Knudsen, Chalmers University of Technology
- Anna McLeod, Durham University
- Joël Vernet, ESO
- Emily Wisnioski, Australian National University

Important dates (preliminary)

Pre-registration is open

- Call for abstracts and registration open: 1 April 2024
- Deadline for abstract submission: end of July 2024