The Call for Proposals for observations at ESO telescopes in Period 110 (1 October 2022 - 31 March 2023) has been released. Please consult the Period 110 document for the main news items and policies related to applying for time on ESO telescopes. All technical information about the offered instruments and facilities is contained on ESO webpages that are linked from the Call. The proposal submission deadline is 12:00 CET 25 March 2022.
The P110 Call for Proposal is open and ESO is offering a short session on the latest information users need to write proposals for La Silla, Paranal, and APEX. This session will happen on Friday, March 11th at 12 CET on Teams.
As announced in the P110 call for proposals, ESO will no longer offer APEX observing time beyond Period 110. The last opportunity to submit ESO observing proposals for APEX is thus the P110 deadline on 25 March 2022, for observations in the second half of 2022. This corresponds to the end of the current APEX agreement. From 2023 to 2025, ESO will operate APEX as a hosted telescope on a cost neutral basis, but without observing time to the ESO community. Data from the remaining APEX partners taken after 2022 will also no longer be stored in the ESO archive.
Last year proved to be a record-breaking year for research based on observations conducted at ESO observatories. A recent report by the ESO Library and Information Centre shows that, in 2021 alone, over 1100 papers including ESO data were released, the highest annual number of publications from ESO telescope data to date.
The European ALMA Regional Centre invites European ALMA users to a virtual community assembly on March 25 at 11:00 CET, in connection with the Cycle 9 call for proposals. At this meeting, updates will be provided on the current and upcoming observing cycles and on the support from the European ARC network. In the dedicated Q&A session you will have the opportunity to ask your questions. The meeting can be accessed at this link.
GRAVITY dual-feed wide mode allows fringe tracking from a target that is up to 30” away from the science target by using the VLTI Star Separators to separate the beams. This mode augments GRAVITY sky coverage by enabling observations of objects which were too faint for fringe tracking, and without a close (<2") fringe tracker source. Two nights will be offered: one on VLTI-UTs and one on VLTI-ATs, both in mid-June 2022. The proposal submission deadline is 25 March 2022 (same as the Period 110 Call for Proposals) using the Phase 1 tool.
On January 10th 2022, ESO signed an agreement for the design and construction of GRAVITY+, a significant upgrade of the the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) infrastructure and its GRAVITY instrument. The agreement was signed with the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, representing a consortium including MPE, INSU/CNRS, University of Cologne, MPIA, CENTRA, and University of Southampton, in close collaboration with ESO.
The ESO Offices for Science in Garching and in Chile are happy to announce the new Early-Career Scientist Visitor Programme. The programme is meant to allow early-career scientists (PhD students and postdoc up to three years from the PhD) to spend from one to four months working on their science projects at ESO.
The next call for ESO ALMA development studies is expected to be announced in November 2022, with a provisional deadline in January 2023. In this call, ESO will solicit proposals for external development studies to upgrade a broad range of ALMA systems. Studies that follow the scientific priorities outlined in the ALMA 2030 roadmap are particularly encouraged, such as upgrades of the IF bandwidth by a factor up to 4 compared to the current system.
The 4MOST instrument will conduct surveys in a five-year programme. The selection of the surveys for the full five year period followed the procedures set out in the VLT/I Science Operations Policies and involved calls for Letters of Intent and invitations to submit a proposal following recommendations by the Public Survey Panel (PSP). The PSP recommended 15 community surveys to be selected for 4MOST observations. The selection was endorsed by the Observing Programmes Committee at its 108th meeting in November 2021. The selected surveys will become part of the 4MOST project in preparation for the observing planned to start in late 2023.
The University of Exeter (UK) is hosting The Sharpest Eyes on the Sky, a conference co-sponsored by ESO focussing on the latest science results from optical interferometers and other very high angular resolution techniques. The meeting will be held in the tradition of the past CHARA meetings and VLTI community days, bringing both communities together for the first time. There will be time for discussions regarding the recent and future technological development of CHARA and VLTI, including how to best exploit these advancements in synergy with other facilities and instruments. Participants can attend either in-person at Exeter or online. The meeting has been dedicated to the memory of Dr. Matthew Willson, a promising young scientist in high-angular resolution astronomy who passed away in January under tragic circumstances. Abstract submission will close on 7 March 2022.
The APEX telescope has obtained CO(2-1) spectra for a sample of 165 hard-X-Ray-selected AGN galaxies detected in observations by the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) onboard Swift. These observations, taken under the ESO programme id 198.A-0708, PI M. Koss, allow a statistical comparison of AGN and non-AGN dominated galaxies in the local Universe, for example from the ALLSMOG APEX survey. As this programme mainly aimed at observing a statistical sample of nearby AGN, many of the galaxies observed are well-known galaxies, and these Phase 3 data can provide a valuable total power measurement of the CO(2-1) emission which then can be combined with interferometric observations obtained with ALMA. Additionally, the BASS (BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey) sample includes a variety of other ESO data products including hundreds of spectra with VLT/Xshooter, VLT/MUSE, and VLT/FORS2 with more information at the BASS survey website.
The Southern H-ATLAS Regions in Ks-band (SHARKS) is a deep Ks-band imaging survey conducted with the wide-field VIRCAM imager at the VISTA telescope. The project was granted 1200 hours of observing time under the ESO programme 198.A-2006 (PI H. Dannerbauer) as one of seven approved second cycle VISTA Public Surveys. It covers ~300 deg2, including large parts of the South Galactic Plane (SGP), GAMA-12h (G12) and GAMA-15h (G15) fields from the H-ATLAS survey, the largest Herschel program. The survey has been designed to provide the best possible counterpart identification for ∼90% of the sources detected at 0 < z < 3 by H-ATLAS, ASKAP, SKA and LOFAR; to produce a sample of strong lenses for cosmography studies; to study the evolution of the most massive structures in the Universe.
Login to the ESO Operations Helpdesk via the ESO User Portal has been enabled for all users since Jan 27th, 2022. The login button is located in the top-right corner of the user interface and will take you to the ESO User Portal login screen. After logging in, you can submit a ticket using the "Submit Helpdesk Ticket" button, this ticket will be pre-filled with your contact information. Use the "My tickets" entry in the user menu available from the top-right corner of the interface to access your tickets. On that page, you can see the status of your requests and you can also interact with us directly from the site. Email interactions remain of course possible, this new feature does not supersede the communication channel that you are already used to. ESO welcomes feedback from the users’ community about this tool and will continue improving it.
Are you an author on an upcoming scientific study based on ESO data that could be relevant to journalists or the wider public? Or are you a Principal Investigator on ESO observations with potential to become stunning images like that above? If so, please consider sending your paper and/or a preview of the image(s) obtained with ESO telescopes to ESO's Media Manager Barbara Ferreira at press@eso.org.
During the EAS2022 annual meeting in Valencia, Spain (27.06 – 01.07) the S14 symposium titled "ESO@60: a stairway to the Universe" will be held to celebrate the scientific achievements with the ESO facilities over the last 60 years. The scientific program will consist of six blocks of 1.5 hrs each, with each block covering a broad theme, starting from Extrasolar planets, Astrochemistry and Nucleo-synthesis, Stellar populations, Black holes, Cosmology & Galaxy evolution and then onto the ELT and the future. The registration and abstract submission are now opened, with abstract submission deadline on 01.03.2022. More information on sessions, keynote speakers, scientific organising committee and co-Chairs can be found on the S14 web page.
Chilean based observatories have been leading the scientific research in several astronomical areas. This forum is organized around the highest impact science results in the last few years. We will show how these different observatories contributed to major advances in Astrophysics and we will put emphasis on the scientific involvement of the astronomers working at those observatories on those high impact results.
The goal of this workshop is to bring together the galactic, extragalactic, and high-redshift communities, both theorists and observers, with the final goal of fostering fruitful discussions and new collaborations on the formation of the central regions of galaxies. Amongst the main topics to be discussed are: Chemo-dynamical properties of the MW bulge, observed properties of bulges and link to formation scenarios, bulges in a cosmological context, clumpy discs, mergers and bulge formation at high redshifts, and formation and evolution of bulges from a theoretical perspective. The meeting is intended to be highly participative, with substantial time devoted to discussions to promote cross-disciplinary interactions and exchange of ideas. This ESO Workshop should set the basis for the study of galaxy bulges in the new decade.
The primary goal of this workshop is to discuss the relevance of reproducible workflows in astronomy and potential pathways for the astronomical community. As part of the workshop, examples will be shared of reproducible work as well as tools and techniques for improving reproducibility and for mining astronomical data. Also discussed will be community guides, tools and white papers related to data sharing, reproducible workflows, data mining and big-data problems. This will include making recommendations for hiring and funding bodies that will aim to encourage open approaches and retain expertise in the astronomical community. Groups will be organised to continue this work after the workshop is concluded to widen community participation.
Technologies associated with artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, data science, deep learning, and neural networks are already embedded in our daily lives. Also astronomical research is deeply impacted by the advances of AI technologies. The large amount and complexity of data produced by modern astronomical facilities require AI based technologies to allow efficient processing, and novel, synoptical, analysis and discovery methods. They add value to both engineering, observatory operations and science, with the final goal to enhance data exploitation. Building on the success of the previous series of similar events, this ESO/ESA workshop aims to facilitate the exchange of current developments and applications of AI enabled technologies in science operations for space- and ground-based astronomical facilities. The entire scientific operations workflow starting from proposal and observation preparation, scheduling and execution of observing programs, data analysis and archiving will be examined.
