With the release of the La Silla Paranal telescope schedule, the Phase 2 preparation for runs scheduled in Service Mode begins. The deadline for the submission of the Phase 2 material for Period 114 is Tuesday, 6 August 2024. The Service Mode guidelines provide detailed information about Phase 2 material preparation with the web application p2, while the instrument overview table provides quick links to user manuals, tools and p2 tutorials for individual instruments.
The 114th Observing Programmes Committee (OPC) met during May 2024. Based on the committee's recommendations to the ESO Director General, a total of 8148 hours of (Designated) Visitor Mode and Service Mode observations were allocated on the VLT/VLTI, the 3.6-metre, and NTT telescopes. The schedule timeline and the list of scheduled runs is publicly available.
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 to further shape a community-wide science perspective and effort, supported by integral-field spectroscopy. Please be reminded that the deadline for the abstract submission for the MUSE24 workshop is Monday, 15th July.
The Opticon Radionet Pilot (ORP) funding remains available till the end of 2024 for travel to one of the European ALMA Regional Centre nodes in Europe, for ALMA users who need face-to-face support for their ALMA projects. Users wishing to apply for ORP funding should fill out the form in addition to submitting a Helpdesk ticket that is required to arrange the ARC node visit. Face-to-face visits to ARC nodes can be arranged for assistance with data calibration and analysis, proposal preparation, and archive research projects.
A detailed report of the Cycle 11 Proposal Submission Statistics is now available. The report provides a summary of items such as the number of submitted proposals and time requested, subscription rates, and comparisons with the number of hours requested in previous Cycles. The report can be downloaded as a pdf document.
A new ALMA development study to automatically extract spectral line sources from ALMA data cubes and derive advanced data products from them had its kick-off meeting on 3 June 2024 in Gothenburg (Sweden). This new study, led by the Onsala Space Observatory (OSO, Chalmers University, Sweden), will start by examining how to optimize the Source Finding Application (SoFiA) software to extract emission lines from ALMA data cubes. The identified line emitting sources will then be run through the SoFiA Imaging Pipeline (SIP) to produce publication-quality advanced data products such as moment 0, 1 and 2 maps, position-velocity diagrams and extracted spectra. In the next stages, the study will investigate how to perform automated line identification, based on redshift information available in the archive. This can be used to improve the derivation of source properties in the advanced data products. The study aims to serve a broad range of science topics and to be able to be run on calibrated ALMA data cubes in the archive from previous Cycles. The ultimate goal is to enhance the scientific accessibility of spectral line data products for a wide range of scientific applications.
UltraVISTA is an ultra-deep near-infrared survey of the central region of the COSMOS field. A recent overview of UltraVISTA can be found in this presentation. The sixth and last UltraVISTA data release, "DR6" or "Legacy", comprises stacked images in YJHKs and NB118 narrow-band filters, as well as single-band and dual-mode source lists. The data release also contains a five-band merged catalogue, created from the individual Ks-selected source lists. The release is based on the observations carried out from December 2009 to March 2023, corresponding to 99,845 individual images. The observations obtained since the DR5 release are mostly in the Y-band "deep" stripes in order to bring them to the same depth as the previously observed "ultra-deep" stripes. Thus, in this release, the depth is nearly uniform over the full field for the broad-band YJHKs filters. This release also uses GTO data obtained in 2010 in the J and the NB118 filters in the "deep" stripes.
As previously announced, an open process to recruit an LPO Director was launched by ESO in late 2023. Thomas Klein, currently Deputy Director of the La Silla Paranal Observatory and Programme Manager of the Integrated Operations Programme, was selected following a competitive process. Thomas will begin his service as LPO Director on 1 August 2024, reporting to Andreas Kaufer, who will remain ESO Director of Operations.
Following discussions with Council and the Scientific and Technical Committee during 2023, ESO is now merging the three instrumentation programmes that are in place for its optical/infrared telescopes: The Paranal Instrumentation Programme; the ELT instrumentation project, for the ELT construction instruments; and the Armazones Instrumentation Programme, for the future ELT instrumentation.
BlueMUSE is an optical seeing-limited, blue-optimised, medium spectral resolution, panoramic integral-field-spectrograph, to be installed at the VLT. With a wide wavelength coverage (350 - 580 nm), an average spectral resolution of R=4000 and a field-of-view of 1arcmin², BlueMUSE will offer new and unique science opportunities in many fields of astrophysics. ESO has approved the Phase A (conceptual design) of the project led by PI Johan Richard from the Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon (France), the laboratory leading the consortium composed of a total of 9 institutes world-wide. The expected first-light for the BlueMUSE instrument is 2031.
Gas flowing into, out of, and around galaxies plays a key role in shaping how their properties evolve over cosmic time. The mechanisms driving these behaviors are poorly understood, largely because we lack detailed knowledge of fundamental gas properties across multiple scales and phases. Tackling these issues necessarily requires a multi-wavelength approach. Fortunately, the southern hemisphere hosts the most comprehensive suite of observational facilities available for tackling this topic, in the form of the ESO, ALMA, the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) precursors (MWA, ASKAP and MeerKAT), and very soon, the SKA-Mid and SKA-Low telescopes. This conference, which will take place near Busselton Australia, from 9 to 13 December 2024, is sponsored by both ESO and the SKA as it supports the joint science of both facilities that will be dominant in astronomy in the coming decade.
On 5 June, ESO signed an agreement with an international consortium of institutions for the design and construction of ANDES, the ArmazoNes high Dispersion Echelle Spectrograph. The ANDES instrument will be installed on ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). It will be used to search for signs of life in exoplanets and look for the very first stars, as well as to test variations of the fundamental constants of physics and measure the acceleration of the Universe’s expansion.
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.
The aim of this workshop is to unite researchers across diverse fields to exchange fresh insights into the circumgalactic medium (CGM) and its impact on shaping the evolution of galaxies. Specifically, we aim to explore and elucidate the interplay between the different diffuse media (circum and intergalactic media) and the stellar and interstellar components of galaxies throughout cosmic history. Additionally, we intend to delve into existing observational and computational constraints, while outlining the most promising methodologies for studying diffuse media, particularly in light of the forthcoming ELTs and new instrumentation.
Gas flowing into, out of, and around galaxies plays a key role in shaping how their properties evolve over cosmic time. The mechanisms driving these behaviors are poorly understood, largely because we lack detailed knowledge of fundamental gas properties across multiple scales and phases. Tackling these issues necessarily requires a multi-wavelength approach. Fortunately, the southern hemisphere hosts the most comprehensive suite of observational facilities available for tackling this topic, in the form of the ESO, ALMA, the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) precursors (MWA, ASKAP and MeerKAT), and very soon, the SKA-Mid and SKA-Low telescopes.
This conference is supported and sponsored by both ESO and the SKA as it supports the joint science of both facilities that will be dominant in astronomy in the coming decade. It brings together astronomers from optical/IR, FIR/submm, radio, and theory domains, with the common interest of understanding the evolving role of gas in galaxies over cosmic time using ESO and SKA facilities.
