European
Southern
Observatory
ESO Science Newsletter November 2023
17 Nov 2023

This newsletter is a summary of recent ESO Science Announcement items. Follow the links or visit ESO Science Announcements to read more.



Science Announcements


ESO's Extremely Large Telescope is now Half Completed

15 Nov 2023:

The European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope (ESO’s ELT) will have a 39-metre main mirror and will be the largest telescope in the world for visible and infrared light. Construction of this technically complex project is advancing at a good pace, with the ELT now surpassing the 50% complete milestone.

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Third and Final Release of the Programme 'INvestigating Stellar Population In RElics' (INSPIRE)

14 Nov 2023:

The scientific objective of the XShooter ESO Large Program 1104.B-0370 INSPIRE (PI: C. Spiniello), is to create the first catalogue of spectroscopically confirmed relics in the redshift range 0.1<z<0.5, which bridges the gap between the three local confirmed relics and the high-z red nugget galaxies. The availability of this sample of objects enables to put stringent constraint on the predictions from simulations on the initial intense phase of star formation in passive galaxies.

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ALMA Previews and Thumbnails Now Available in the ESO Archive Science Portal

14 Nov 2023:

The ESO Archive Science portal was upgraded to include previews and thumbnails of ALMA data, alongside those for La Silla Paranal. They provide a rich and concise overview of the data to guide users in identifying those of interest. Hovering with the mouse on the Actions column in the result table pops up the preview thumbnail. Clicking on the icon in the same column opens a dedicated page, where a detailed preview directly from the ALMA Science Archive is displayed. Previews and thumbnails are only presented for publicly available data, both for ALMA and La Silla Paranal.

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New ESO Environment to Run Pipelines Has Been Released

10 Nov 2023:

A beta release of the new ESO Data Processing System (EDPS) is now available for download. EDPS is a system to automatically organise data from ESO instruments for pipeline processing and running the pipelines on these data. The current recommended usage of EDPS is for experimenting and batch processing. KMOS, ESPRESSO and the UVES pipelines are supported. More pipelines will be added in the next few months.

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‘The ALMA Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade’: First Announcement of a Workshop on the Most Ambitious Upgrade of ALMA since its Conception

06 Nov 2023:

This is the first announcement of the ESO workshop 'The promise and challenges of the ALMA Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade' to take place at ESO - Garching from 24 to 28 June 2024. 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.

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'What Was That?' - Workshop Registration and Abstract Submission are now Open

31 Oct 2023:

The abstract submission and the registration for 'What was that? – an ESO workshop on planning follow up for transients, variables, and solar system objects in the era of LSST' is now open.

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The Messenger 191 is Now Available

31 Oct 2023:

The latest issue 191 of ESO’s science and technology journal, The Messenger, is now available online. It features articles in celebration of the 60th anniversary of the collaboration between ESO and Chile, as well as the 10th anniversary of ALMA’s operations. The Astronomical Science section presents a selection of the scientific highlights from the first ten years of the MUSE Collaboration, as well as an overview of the VISTA Star Formation Atlas (VISIONS) public survey’s data release and scientific outlook.

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First Release of X-Shooter Spectra from the Young Stellar Objects Observed under the PENELLOPE Large Programme

27 Oct 2023:

The PENELLOPE Large Programme (Pr.Id. 106.20Z8) is a multi-instrument spectroscopic survey aimed at obtaining complementary data to the targets of the ULLYSES program. The latter is a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Director’s Discretionary Time that was executed in a three-year period, from HST Cycle 27 through Cycle 29 (2020-2022). The HST ULLYSES program is aimed at obtaining low- and medium-resolution spectra of young stars covering the wavelength range from ∼140 nm to ∼1 μm, hence providing a view of accretion and ejection tracers at ultraviolet wavelengths. The PENELLOPE program is a public community-driven effort. It provides optical high-resolution (ESPRESSO, UVES, R>60,000) and medium-resolution flux-calibrated optical and infrared spectra (up to 2.5 μm) with X-Shooter (R > 10,000), giving access to information that is otherwise not obtainable with the HST spectra provided by ULLYSES, such as main stellar properties, accurate interstellar extinction, and veiling; kinematics and geometry of the accretion and wind processes, and more.  

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Upcoming ESO or ESO-related workshops

The goal of this meeting is to encourage coordination in the communities who study the variable, transient and moving objects that the Vera C Rubin observatory’s LSST will discover vast numbers of, to figure out how best ESO’s facilities can provide the necessary follow up.

The workshop will take place at the ESO Headquarters in Garching near Munich and remotely (via MS Teams) from the morning of Tuesday, 23rd until noon of Friday 26th of January. Monday late afternoon/evening is planned for registration and get together.

 

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.