Upcoming ESO or ESO-related workshops
The coming decade will mark a transformative era for high–angular resolution astronomy. With the arrival of the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) and its first‐generation instruments - MICADO, HARMONI, and their AO component MORFEO - together with the next generation of high-sky-coverage adaptive-optics facilities in the optical on the VLT, such as MAVIS, the astronomical community will, for the first time, routinely access spatial resolutions of ~40 mas across the optical and infrared domains, with high sensitivity and diverse spectral and imaging capabilities. This unprecedented development will open new parameter spaces for exploring the formation and evolution of stars, planets, and galaxies, as well as probing the physics of compact objects and the distant Universe.This international conference at ESO aims to bring together the diverse scientific communities developing and preparing to exploit these instruments.
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.
Type II supernovae (SNeII) are among the brightest and most common stellar explosions in the Universe, signaling the dramatic final chapters in the lives of many massive stars. These events originate from massive stars—those with initial masses exceeding eight times that of the Sun—that have retained most of their hydrogen-rich envelopes. As these stars reach the end of their life cycles, their iron cores collapse, unleashing a burst of neutrinos and a shock wave that powers the ensuing explosion and its striking luminosity.
This workshop will create a dedicated space to confront such questions through both observational and theoretical perspectives exploring the connections between pre-supernova stellar structure, explosion dynamics, and observable features. The most up-to-date findings using hydrodynamical simulations, radiative transfer modeling, archival or new multi-wavelength observations, light curve and spectral modeling, and machine-learning-based classifications in time-domain surveys will all be welcome contributions. Furthermore, contributions will be targetted that link SNeII to broader astrophysical contexts, such as dust production, galactic feedback, chemical enrichment, and their utility as cosmological distance indicators.
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 large-scale characterisation surveys. This ESO 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.
This workshop will focus mostly on quiescent and non-accreting galactic nuclei. These systems are essential for understanding the full range of nuclear evolutionary pathways, complementary to studies of accreting AGNs. At the same time, new observing facilities provide fresh opportunities: GRAVITY+, operational from 2026, will deliver early high-precision interferometric results on both quiescent galactic nuclei and AGN, extending stellar dynamical studies into regimes not previously accessible. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory (LSST) will begin uncovering large samples of tidal disruption events (TDEs) and other nuclear transients, providing powerful probes of otherwise dormant black holes. Other current and future facilities will add complementary perspectives, broadening the discovery space.
The workshop will therefore provide a timely forum to assess recent progress, present first results from new facilities, and discuss how the scientific focus of this field will develop in the coming decades.
Thermal infrared astronomy is entering a pivotal decade, driven by cutting-edge instrumentation and a growing range of science applications. At ESO, facilities such as MATISSE and VISIR and the newly operational ERIS provide high spatial and spectral resolution that enables detailed studies of protoplanetary disks, exoplanet atmospheres, evolved stars, and obscured galactic nuclei. In parallel, JWST/MIRI is delivering transformative science with unmatched sensitivity from space, highlighting the power of infrared observations. Looking to the future, TAO is bringing ground-based IR observations to literal new heights at Chajnantor with instruments like MIMIZUKU, VLTI/NOTT will allow new views of exoplanets thanks to mid-IR nulling and ELT/METIS will be pushing to new sensitivities in upcoming years. In space, potential projects like LIFE and PRIMA promise to continue expanding our view of the obscured universe.
The IR2026 conference will look to the both the past and the future, looking at the legacy of the soon to be decommissioned VISIR, what we have learnt so far from MIRI and MATISSE, and to prepare for the new instruments on the horizon.
