On 17 June 2026, ESO will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Fellowship Programme with events in Garching and Vitacura. The Director General, the Director for Science, and Fellows from across the years will come together to share memories, revisit moments and anecdotes, and reflect on the experiences that have shaped ESO from within.

The 2025 Chesneau prize for the best PhD thesis in High Angular Resolution Astrophysics has been awarded to two outstanding young researchers: Dr. Violeta Gamez Rosas (left image) and Dr. Manon Lallement (right image). Violeta Gamez Rosas is awarded the prize for her ground breaking observations and astrophysical results on the Active Galactic Nucleus NGC1068 with VLTI/MATISSE, VLTI/GRAVITY and ALMA, as featured in a previous ESO press release in 2022. Manon Lallement is awarded the prize for the development of the FIRST-PL instrument at the Subaru Telescope, using photonic lanterns, as well as the first astrophysical results she obtained using this instrument.

Observations with the VLT, VLTI, and ALMA have pioneered exoplanet science over the past decade. With upcoming results from ESA missions such as Gaia, PLATO, and Ariel, exoplanet research is entering a transformative era of population-scale characterisation surveys. This workshop will bring the community together to explore how current ESO facilities together with powerful archival resources, can best complement exoplanet demographics, atmospheres, and planet formation at the dawn of population-scale studies.

ESO is delighted to announce the upcoming conference Illuminating the Active Universe: Multi-Wavelength and Multi-Messenger Insights into AGN. The conference will be held from in Garching on 14-17 September 2026, on the occasion of the retirement of Paolo Padovani (ESO). It will examine the evolution of Active Galactic Nuclei research from early work on unified schemes of radio-loud sources and BL Lac samples to recent developments in multi-wavelength surveys and multi-messenger observations. 

The second release of SPHERE (Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch instrument) data processed by the High-Contrast Data Centre (HC-DC) is now available in the ESO Science Archive Facility. SPHERE is designed for high-contrast imaging, low-resolution spectroscopy, and polarimetric characterisation of extrasolar planetary systems. This release provides reduced IRDIS imaging data acquired between ESO Periods P95 and P109 (April 2015 – September 2022), including SPHERE consortium Guaranteed Time Observations.