Upcoming ESO or ESO-related workshops
ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) is the state of the art of Infrared Interferometry. With its second-generation instruments (PIONIER, GRAVITY, MATISSE) and undergoing an upgrade to extend the capabilities to faint sources (i.e., many more scientific topics and targets), the VLTI will play a key-role in the ELT era and beyond 2030. At the same time the VLTI has a vast unexplored data archive calling for data mining.
The predominantly hands-on workshop "VLTI-HOW" aims at training a new generation of scientists from Chile and Latin American countries how to access, analyse, and use VLTI data for their research projects. The curriculum will also cover topics important for career development such as proposal and grant writing, job hunting, and work ethics.
Euclid is a high profile ESA mission with important participation from NASA and ground-based observatories around the world, to be launched in 2023. Euclid will provide near-IR imaging and slitless spectroscopy of a quality impossible to achieve from the ground (1). The mission aims at characterising with unprecedented accuracy the properties of Dark Energy by mapping the evolution of the large-scale structures of the Universe over the past 10 billion years. In addition to the primary cosmology science case, Euclid will have a major impact on our understanding of galaxy formation, from cosmic dawn to the present time.
The workshop will address ESA/ESO synergies and beyond, for realizing the full potential of the Euclid legacy programmes. Sessions will cover three major areas of research: high-redshift objects in the wide-and deep Euclid surveys, evolution of galaxies and their nuclear black holes at intermediate redshifts, and galaxies in the local universe.
The European Southern Observatory (ESO) and the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Observatory are jointly organising a workshop with the main goal of maximising the science impact of surveys conducted by both organisation’s facilities. The aims of the workshop are to raise awareness across the respective communities of survey capabilities and to build liaisons in preparation of synergetic surveys. To achieve this, the workshop will have sessions focussing on planned surveys and upcoming survey facilities, including SKA pathfinder and precursor instruments as well as the SKA, and ESO’s optical, near infrared and mm facilities. It will cover a variety of research areas, from transients and Galactic star formation to galaxy evolution and cosmology. In addition, ample time will be reserved for more focussed discussion sessions to forge synergies between different teams and develop plans for collaborative surveys.
The workshop will be held at the ESO headquarters in Garching near Munich, from 14 to 18 November 2022 and will allow virtual as well as in-person participation. A first announcement, including details on the exact format, information on contributed presentations etc will be circulated soon.
Exoplanets have become central to astrophysics. The formation and evolution of exoplanets can now be explored with instrumentation and observational techniques covering multiple physical scales and wavelengths. The composition and substructures of planet-forming disks can be observed directly, and we witness and characterise young proto-planets in formation. Planetary atmospheres, architectures and demographics can be systematically scrutinised to refine our understanding of the physical processes at play in the formation of giant and terrestrial planets, and in favorable conditions for the emergence of life. ESO facilities provide access to a large part of the electromagnetic spectrum to probe cold and hot phases, dynamics and interactions, close and distant environments, and the relations with the host star. Synergies between the ESO facilities have led to unique discoveries, e.g. the PDS 70 planetary system, and can successfully be used in synergy with space facilities, e.g. HST, CHEOPS, TESS, GAIA, JWST.
This workshop aims to provide an overview of the state of the field, to explore the synergies provided by ESO’s current and future facilities (ALMA/ELT/VLT/VLTI/La Silla telescopes/CTA), and synergies with other space and ground-based observatories (GAIA, JWST, PLATO, Roman observatory, LRIOUV, GMT, TMT). The main goal is to identify future scientific opportunities to consolidate key questions in planetary formation and characterization, contrasting and comparing how planned and potential instruments can answer them.
The accretion and ejection of material are the two dominant processes driving star formation and protoplanetary disk evolution. Accretion via circumstellar disks has a significant footprint on both protostellar evolution and the pre-main-sequence phase, while the specific accretion rates set boundaries on the resulting stellar masses as well as the lifespan of protoplanetary discs. On the other hand, the ejection of matter, in the form of outflows, winds and jets, is a ubiquitous phenomenon towards young accreting stars of ranging masses and evolutionary stages. Indeed, jets/winds can remove excess angular momentum and have a strong influence on the final mass a star can reach, and on the immediate environment where planets form (i.e, the protoplanetary disks).
This workshop proposes to gather the Chilean-based star formation community working in this field, in order to debate the state-of-the-art theories and observations targeting the accretion/ejection processes in star formation. The aim is to establish a platform for students and early-career scientists in the field in addition to a limited number of invited overview talks. There will be ample time for discussion and interaction between the participants, thus aiding the interchange of knowledge on the different observational and numerical techniques and wavelength coverages for a range of stellar masses (low to high) and evolutionary stages (embedded to PMS). Being held at the ESO/Vitacura campus, the workshop will take advantage of the local knowledge in instrumentation and observational techniques (ALMA, VLT(I)). The rationale is to exchange recent results on accretion-ejection in young stars, from low to high mass and from early to more evolved stages.
The workshop is aimed to host up to 30 on-site participants. Given the limited amount of participants it is recommend not to book flights or accomodation until the SOC confirm your contribution (by 1st of October).
Modeling the mechanisms, AGN or stellar feedback, that expel baryons from collapsed structures and trigger the baryonic exchange, represent at the moment the major strength but also the greatest weakness of our paradigm of galaxy formation and evolution.
The workshop aims at reviewing the latest results of the X-ray and SZ data able to characterise the hot phase of the elusive intra-group and circum-galactic medium in low mass halos. eROSITA, particularly sensitive in the soft X-ray band, revealed to be a perfect “filament & group finding machine” and is providing exciting results in this respect. In addition, the large effort of dedicated upcoming deep XMM surveys of local groups and ongoing stacking analysis of existing SZ datasets will make possible to extend our knowledge of the hot gas in the viral and circum-galactic region as never before. Furthermore, the availability of IFU observations from ESO/MUSE, ESO/KMOS, KCWI, HST/COS, Alma data and LOFAR radio data will enable revealing the multiphase nature of the CGM and its interconnection with the halo gas on larger scale, and with the central AGN and galactic component on smaller scale. By reviewing such new results and by comparing them with the current predictions, the MMC workshop will create a clear picture of where we stand in our understanding of the interplay between AGN feedback and gas in the bulk of the virialised dark matter halo population.
