Seminars and Colloquia at ESO Garching and on the campus

I will present an overview of the instrumentation development program and strategic R&D interests of the Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Center, part of the National Research Council of Canada. Active major facility class instrumentation development includes real time control systems for the ELT's ANDES and MORFEO  instruments, next generation correlators for ALMA and the SKA mid telescopes, opto-mechanical systems for the Gemini Infrared Multi-Object Spectrograph (GIRMOS) and the second generation of the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI2), as well as low noise amplifiers for SKA mid and CCAT. I discuss the related R&D program and technology development roadmaps, including but not limited to adaptive optics, high contrast imaging and detectors. Finally, I discuss the evolving Canadian astronomical landscape and highlight future opportunities.

Red supergiant stars (RSG) are experiencing significant mass loss. It ultimately determines their late evolution into a type II supernova leading to a remnant that can be a neutron star or a black hole. Therefore, understanding the mass loss properties is key to predicting their final fate. Optical interferometry has previously shown that the surface of RSGs present prominent convective features. Further away from the photosphere, several direct images of RSG have revealed large clumps of dust in their surroundings, providing clear evidence of inhomogeneous mass loss. However, current radiative-hydrodynamics simulations of RSG fail to explain how such an amount of material leaves the star, although they do predict the strong convective activity. Antares, the closest RSG, is the ideal laboratory to better investigate the mass-loss phenomenon, its triggering mechanisms, and the processes by which material escapes from the star. Using a multi-epoch VLTI/GRAVITY dataset, we aim to link the convection on the star’s photosphere to the material in the upper molecular layers, and ultimately unveil the physical mechanism that triggers mass loss.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has changed our way of assessing, processing, and distributing information, and Large Language Models (LLMs) like Chat GPT, Gemini, Claude and others could be seen as a replacement of intellectual performance previously only available through human intelligence. In the scientific community, many of us have been using AI and LLMs to accelerate their scientific productivity. However, it is unclear whether LLMs are actually needed to do high-quality science or simply yield higher productivity without substantially extending knowledge? This informal discussion was triggered by a discussion I had with Jason at the ESO guest house in Chile in January. I would like to discuss whether science actually profits from LLMs or if these tools rather undermine novel, quality research by design.

Thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, combined with major ground-based facilities and gravitational lensing (“cosmic telescopes”), we have entered an era in which stellar clusters can be identified at cosmological distances. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is now transforming this field -- and, more broadly, our view of the early Universe. With its exceptional sensitivity and angular resolution at infrared wavelengths, JWST, when coupled to strong gravitational lensing, can isolate individual star clusters even within the first half 0.5 Gyr of cosmic history. This lensing-enhanced spatial contrast enables the identification of candidate progenitors of present-day globular clusters and places them in the context of key questions, from the sources of ionizing photons during reionization to the emergence of extremely metal-poor (possibly near-pristine) star formation, and the possible connection to black-hole seeds. Looking ahead, ground-based facilities in the 2030s equipped with extreme adaptive optics (AO) -- most notably the ELT -- will consolidate these studies and push to even finer physical scales. The synergy between space and ground-based facilities will thus open an unprecedented window on the earliest stellar systems, connecting parsec-scale star formation to the assembly of galaxies and black holes in the reionization era.