Successful 4MOST community workshop

by Joe Liske on 2019-05-10

On 6 – 8 May 2019, the workshop Preparing for 4MOST: A community workshop introducing ESO’s next-generation spectroscopic survey facility took place at ESO in Garching, Germany. It was organised jointly by ESO and the 4MOST Consortium to prepare the ESO community for the upcoming "Call for Letters of Intent for Public Spectroscopic Surveys with 4MOST" (currently planned for Q4 2019). This Call will represent the start of the process by which ESO will select the Community Surveys to be carried out in the 30% of the observing time of the first 5 years of operations that will be available to the community.

In a total of 17 presentations, the 4MOST Consortium provided the participants with up-to-date information on the 4MOST facility, its capabilities, survey strategy, data reduction and science pipelines, as well as the 4MOST Consortium’s scientific plans, while ESO described the application and selection process. The community, in turn, presented its ideas for Community Surveys in 16 talks, covering a wide range of scientific topics, from exoplanets, to stellar clusters, galaxy evolution, and AGN.

A number of question and discussion sessions provided the opportunity for participants to clarify any remaining issues, and to jointly discuss the connections between the scientific ideas presented by the community and the plans of the Consortium.

A full summary of the workshop is provided by Liske & Mainieri, 2019, The Messenger, 177, 61.