Upcoming ESO or ESO-related workshops
ALMA is embarking on its most ambitious upgrade since its conception: the Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade (WSU). This upgrade constitutes the top priority of the ALMA 2030 roadmap. It consists of an increase of the instantaneous spectral bandwidth by as much as a factor of four, while retaining full spectral resolution over the entire bandwidth, thus resulting in increases of the spectral scan speed up to a factor of 50 for the highest spectral resolution. In addition, an upgrade of the full signal chain of ALMA – from the receivers and digitizers, all the way through to the correlated data – will result in increases in sensitivity for all observations. ALMA Band 2, the flagship ALMA upgrade project being led by ESO, will be the first receiver to exploit this new, wide bandwidth.
The aim of this workshop is to widely present the upgrade and engage the community by showcasing the science that will be enabled in the upcoming years, during which some changes on scientific operations are expected due to the extent of the upgrade, deployment, and commissioning activities. At the same time, ESO will also solicit input from the ALMA community that will be used to inform priorities during the commissioning phase.
Planet-forming disks can nowadays be probed with unprecedented detail thanks to facilities, such as ALMA at sub-millimeter wavelengths or high-contrast imaging instruments in the near-infrared such as the VLT/SPHERE instrument. In the past decade these facilities have transformed the field of planet formation enabling both moderate resolution statistical disk surveys and high resolution imaging studies of disks.
Today the field is driven by observations, and it seems to be continuing along this path with JWST upcoming results and the many recently accepted Large Programs in the field of planet-formation that are ongoing at different facilities. Theory and models are faced with the task of explaining much more complex scenarios of disk evolution, planet formation, planet-disk interaction.
This workshop aims to bring together observers with expertise in different wavelength regimes, theorists, and modellers, to review the state of the art, pin-point the main open questions, and explore new venues.
GRAVITY has transformed optical interferometry thanks to its unprecedented sensitivity. GRAVITY+ will yet improve VLTI sensitivity by being able to observe targets as faint as K<22 mag. This will allow significant breakthroughs across astrophysical domains as different as AGNs, young stellar objects and exoplanets. Thanks to the sensitivity boost provided by GRAVITY+ this is the time to open VLTI to explore new fundamental physics by installing a new high-resolution grism for GRAVITY+. This workshop is aimed at the wider spectroscopic, and spectro-interferometric community to gather new ideas about how to maximise the scientific exploration of the new GRAVITY high resolution capabilities, and engage with the spectroscopic community with or without interferometric experience.
Understanding the processes that govern the evolution of galaxies is a pressing issue in astrophysics. The observed tension between the galaxy's stellar mass function and the Dark Matter (DM) halo mass function in the LCDM framework has led researchers to explore various mechanisms to reconcile theory with observations. Two pivotal phenomena regulating star-formation efficiency and metallicity are the galactic outflows driven by star formation (SF) feedback and/or active galactic nuclei (AGN) and a variable integrated stellar Initial Mass Function (IMF). It is clear that these physical processes significantly influence the mass build-up in a galaxy during its star formation history, subsequently affecting chemical enrichment, overall gas phase, and stellar metallicity. However, the intricacies of their interplay and the individual role of each process remain not fully understood. This workshop aspires to address this complex issue. Capitalizing on the opportune timing, it is planned to use the fresh insights provided by the newly-arrived data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and VLT/ERIS. Looking ahead, the worshop is also gearing up to harness the potential of forthcoming resources such as VLT/MOONS, VISTA/4MOST, and ELT.
The technology around Artificial Intelligence (AI) has nowadays achieved remarkable performances in terms of speed, response quality, affordability to the public and reliability. The use of AI technologies will soon (if not already!) play a significant role in the way scientists, and astronomers in particular, process data, write and evaluate applications of all sorts (research grants, observing proposals, job applications), or more generally, the way research is done in astronomy. Beyond the impact on the way science is done, AI might have a non-negligible sociological impact, overtaking some of the tasks currently requiring human intervention, hence removing or mitigating the need of a variety of skills (e.g., programming, peer-review and evaluations, administrative tasks).
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.
