Upcoming ESO or ESO-related workshops
- SOXS Day
Garching bei München, 1 July 2025
ESO will host a SOXS day on July 1, 2025, to present the SOXS instrument and its science opportunitites to the community. During this day, talks will be delivered on the instrument capabilites and the operations model, the science opportunities and the GTO programme, and the policies that will govern the operations of SOXS. Further, there will be time for questions and discussions.
The intricate physics governing galaxy evolution, from inflows and outflows to star formation-driven turbulence and stellar feedback, operate on small scales, often just a few parsec. For years, such detailed resolution was achievable only for the Milky Way and its immediate satellites. However, recent advancements driven by major investments for ESO facilities, including ALMA and the VLT, along with synergetic instruments such as the HST, JWST, SITELLE, VLA, and MeerKAT, have triggered a scientific revolution. In response to these exciting advancements, ESO is pleased to announce a workshop dedicated to exploring the latest developments in resolved galaxy properties and evolution. This workshop will bring together leading experts to discuss recent scientific findings and prepare for future breakthroughs in the field.
There is no science without communication and no successful scientists without good writing and presentation skills. You can do the best science that exists, if you don’t write papers about it – papers that get cited! – and if you don’t give presentations that impress people, your science will likely be ignored. Moreover, if you do not write convincing proposals that appeal to non-specialists, you won’t get observing time, nor the coveted post-doc position and certainly not the very competitive but needed grants to fund your research. Finally, as a scientist, it is your duty and privilege to communicate your science to the general public, policy makers and the media, and like all the rest, this is something that needs to be learned.
The one week-long course will allow you to learn how to get your message across in the various supports you need to use as a scientist. At the end of the week, you will be able to write more easily convincing papers and give stunning presentations. You will also learn how to deal with various publics.
Understanding the mechanisms—AGN and stellar feedback—that drive the expulsion and redistribution of baryons in collapsed structures remains a cornerstone of our paradigm for galaxy formation and evolution. These processes are simultaneously the greatest strength and the most significant challenge for theoretical models. While current models can successfully reproduce key observables, such as the evolution of the galaxy stellar mass function and the hot gas content of massive clusters, they diverge considerably in their predictions.
Understanding how giant and rocky planets form and evolve, their internal structure and that of their atmosphere, represents one of the major challenges of modern astronomy, which is directly linked to the ultimate search for life by 2040. At the Horizon 2028-2030, the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) will shine its first light on the sky. The high angular resolution and the great collecting capacity associated with the extreme sensitivity of the instruments will allow unprecedented observations of the regions of planetary formation and exoplanetary systems. In this perspective, the ESO community has developed a key expertise on the study of the initial conditions of planetary formation, the search for exoplanets, the atmospheric characterisation of giant and rocky exoplanets, and the search for biomarkers. This community includes various international laboratories and scientists who are also heavily involved at a technical and scientific level in the construction, scientific preparation and operation of the ELT instruments, and who have the opportunity to play a key role in ensuring a global return and shared success in the exploitation of the ELT.
