Letters of Intent received in 2016

LoI 2018-1928
The European ELT - Project status & plans for early science

Topics

- status of the ELTs and their instrumentation
- challenges of adaptive optics
- new observing and analysis strategies
- science drivers and opportunities:
- cosmology
- formation and evolution of galaxies through cosmic time
- resolved and unresolved stellar populations
- interstellar and intergalactic matter
- Galactic archaeology
- star and planet formation
- exoplanet characterization
- solar system
- fundamental physics constants

Rationale

The European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) will be the world's largest optical/IR telescope, with a collecting area greater than all of the current generation of large ground-based telescopes put together. This transformative facility is now well into its construction phase (first light in 2024), with the contract to build the dome and main structure recently agreed, and the first set of instruments in their advanced design stage ahead of production. In parallel, comprehensive simulations are underway to quantify the scientific capabilities of the instruments and to develop key cases for early science observations. Furthermore the other two giant telescopes (Giant Magellan and Thirty Meter Telescopes) are similarly underway.

Therefore, the 2018 General Assembly will be a timely opportunity to highlight recent progress on this hugely exciting and important projects to the wider astronomical community.

The meeting will summarise the current status of the telescope projects (E-ELT, GMT, TMT), their instrumentation. Emphasis will be given on the challenges imposed by the different flavours of Adaptive Optics systems that will become available at first light or throughout operations: ranging from Ground Layer Adaptive Optics (GLAO) to Single Conjugate Adaptive Optics (SCAO) to Multi Conjugate Adaptive Optics (MCAO) and to Multi-Object Adaptive Optics (MOAO). These challenging instruments shacked off their pioneering laboratory phase and are now producing very interesting results in many astrophysical fields. The use of images collected with AO systems is posing new challenges concerning precise photometry in crowded fields, since the PSF may vary in time and in position across the field of view. The same outcome applies to integral field spectroscopy requiring new strategies and new algorithms to deal with 3D data cubes.

The E-ELT, as well as the TMT and GMT will have a huge impact on many open astrophysical and cosmological problems. On the basis of the science drivers that have already been collected it is difficult to find a single field of modern astrophysical research that will not affected by ELTs. They range from new constraints on fundamental physics constants to measure the expansion of the universe in real time to the reionization of the universe to the formation and evolution of galaxies to resolved and unresolved stellar populations to proto-planetary disks and to the characterization of extrasolar planets. The IAU Symposium will provide a unique opportunity for the various scientific communities to strengthen their knowledge about these premier facilities.

Given the very significant range of science, an IAU General Assembly is the most suitable, ideal (possibly the only viable) venue to bring together experts with backgrounds in such a large range of astrophysics. We believe this to be a very exciting time in the context of this proposed Symposium. Furthermore we would like to stress two relevant issues: We plan to organize the entire symposium with a strict gender and geographical balance. Moreover, the current symposium is relevant for the Austrian Astronomical Community ten years after they joined ESO. Finally, the symposium is going to be a gymnasium for current and the future generations of astronomers.