ESO's Expanding Horizons process aims to identify the main scientific challenges that will face European astronomers in the 2040s, and the type of transformational ground-based facility that will be required to address these fundamental questions. Following the call for Scientific White Papers in late 2025 -an initiative designed to galvanise the European astronomical community to engage in the Expanding Horizons process- ESO is organizing a community-wide workshop on 13-17 July 2026 at ESO's Headquarters in Garching bei München that will bring together astronomers from a wide range of research backgrounds to present their vision of what the key scientific questions will be 2040s. It will also be a platform to investigate the potential synergies between the different scientific themes, the required facilities and the key enabling technologies needed for the 2040s and beyond.

The Users Committee (UC) represents ESO's astronomical community at large and acts as an advisory body to the ESO Director General on matters related to the performance, scientific access, operation and data management facilities to the La Silla Paranal Observatory and ALMA. The 50th annual meeting of the UC is scheduled on 27 and 28 April 2026. During the UC meeting updates from ESO and feedback from the user community are exchanged and openly discussed. Each year one topic is explored in more detail and this year the Special Topic session is dedicated to Time Domain: Target of Opportunity and Rapid Response Mode Observations.

Join ESO during lunch on Monday, June 29, at the EAS Annual Meeting in Lausanne for an interactive session dedicated to helping you fully exploit the scientific potential of the ESO Science Archive and data processing tools. Following an introductory overview of recent developments, the session will focus on hands-on exploration and discussion, with ESO staff available to work directly with participants on their specific scientific needs. Whether you are searching for archival observations, revisiting existing datasets, or preparing new analysis workflows, this session will help you identify and efficiently use both raw and science-ready ESO data products.

The developments over the past decades in high-resolution and multi-object spectroscopy have enabled transformative insights into stars, stellar systems and populations, our Galaxy, and extrasolar planets. In turn, these have triggered the construction of a new generation of powerful instruments that will characterise fainter and more distant systems with unprecedented detail and/or statistical power, opening new windows in our understanding of the exoplanet population, galactic archaeology, and fundamental physics. This conference will bring together communities working on instrumentation, stellar and exoplanet astrophysics, and chemical evolution, serving as a launchpad for reviewing the scientific landscape, new challenges, and future priorities.

Are you a PhD student eager to dive into the cutting-edge scientific world at one of the most prestigious observatories on the planet? The ESO research studentship programme offers you a chance to do just that. This exceptional programme is open to students enrolled in a PhD programme in astronomy or related fields. You will continue your doctoral research under the formal supervision of your home university, but with the added benefit of spending a minimum of six months (Chile) or one year (Germany), and up to two years at ESO, working closely with a dedicated ESO staff astronomer.

Following the ESO Scientific and Technical Committee recommendation, the process started in 2024 with the call, selection and approval of the KMOS Spectroscopic Public Surveys is now completed and resulted in two public survey projects, EMPOWER (extragalactic) and VVVX-GalCen Spectroscopic survey (galactic). These two surveys are now starting their data acquisition since January 2026 and will collect data over the next three years. The approved survey management plans detailing the observing strategies, data reductions and data releases are published on the ESO web pages.

This international conference, jointly organised by ESO, INAF - Arcetri and Macquarie University, aims to bring together the diverse scientific communities developing and preparing to exploit these instruments. Although each facility has unique strengths - MAVIS pushing diffraction-limited performance into the visible on an 8-m telescope, and the ELT instruments delivering unmatched infrared sensitivity and resolution on a 39-m aperture - their science cases are deeply complementary.

The stellar 'Initial Mass Function' (IMF) is a fundamental observable and a crucial component for the understanding of a vast range of astrophysical processes. It is suspected to have its roots in the mass distribution of dense molecular cloud cores resulting from molecular cloud fragmentation, but what shapes this 'Core Mass Function' (CMF) and how core masses really relate to stellar masses, remains unclear. This ESO workshop will summarize and discuss recent observational and theoretical progress on these questions and explore ways forward with ongoing progress in instrumentation (e.g., ALMA upgrade, ELT(s)). The deadline for abstract submissions is 15 February 2026.

ESO is pleased to announce the second and final Phase3 data release of the Large Programme SUPER - SINFONI Survey for Unveiling the Physics and the Effect of Radiative feedback, programme id 196.A-0377, PI V. Mainieri. It uses SINFONI in Seeing-Enhancer mode to study Active Galactic Nuclei at z=2-2.5. The AO assisted observations reach a PSF of 0.2 arcsec in K-band.

Olivier Chesneau, one of the most active and prolific members of the optical interferometry community, passed away in May 2014, at the age of 41. To honour his work in this field, his home institute, the Laboratoire J.-L. Lagrange at the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in France, and ESO established a prize in his memory. Since 2015, the prize has been awarded biennially for the best PhD thesis completed in the field of high angular resolution optical astronomy.