Rationale

After After IRAS opened the FIR window to the Universe in 1983, ESA and its communities developed and launched three powerful satellite missions: ISO, Planck, Spitzer and Herschel, each of which delivered groundbreaking results. ISO, Spitzer and Herschel were observatories, while Planck was a dedicated mission to study the cosmic background.

Today, following the demise of the ESA-JAXA’s SPICA, and the outcome of the ESA M7 process in which no FIR proposals passed the first stage, ESA's science programme does not currently include any FIR mission. PRIMA has been selected by NASA as one of the two candidates for its first Probe-class mission, to fly in the early 2030s. It has substantial European interest and involvement.

In any scenario, it will be important for Europe to continue to build on its heritage in FIR space astronomy, and to remain at the forefront of exploiting the unique scientific advantages that the FIR spectral region has to offer for the study of the Universe.

The results of JWST and ALMA are also rapidly changing astronomical perspectives. New facilities including the ELT, SKA and LISA will be coming online, and there is the prospect of a large ground-based submm single dish telescope in the form of AtLAST.

It is therefore appropriate to reassess the relevance and importance of FIR/submm observations in this new context. PRIMA, if selected, with its cold telescope and advanced detectors, promises to be a hugely powerful mission, with orders of magnitude improvement in sensitivity, and will satisfy many of the immediate needs of the community. However, it will not be the end of the story. It is important to look beyond PRIMA as there are already now very strong scientific incentives for higher angular resolution and high spectral resolution in the far infrared.

The role of FIR/submm observations in the multispectral domain must be evaluated with respect to key science questions for which access to this part of the spectrum is essential.

A main objective of this workshop is to analyze and assess the present situation and future objectives regarding the scientific importance of FIR/submm observations, and the state of technical readiness, including technological developments that will be needed to carry out these observations.

The Meeting

The meeting will be an in-person meeting and takes place in the Boerhave rijksmuseum, that covers most of the important inventions from the history of science in the Netherland. (World famous collection) It is located in the center of the city of Leiden and is within walking distance of its central railway station.

The meeting will be a 3-day workshop, that includes comprehensive invited reviews, selected talks about relevant research, contributed talks and posters. Due to the three-day span of the meeting, there is little space for contributed talks. Therefore, proposed contributions are welcome but may have to be presented as poster. The sessions will cover scientific topics such as cosmology, high-redshift and nearby galaxies, star and planet formation, the solar system, and astrochemistry, as well as techniques and instrumentation including interferometry/VLBI, direct detection and heterodyne technologies. Morning sessions will cover the astronomical key questions while afternoon sessions will address the specific instrumental requirements and review the current state of the art in instrumentation and the foreseen developments, sensitivity enhancements and space adaptations that would allow the scientific key questions to be addressed.

As a legacy of this meeting, we aim to summarize the presentations, posters and discussions in a White Paper.

Scientific Organising Committee

Local Organising Committee

Ancillary

As a side objective, this workshop is also in honor of Thijs de Graauw and his collaborators. Some details about Thijs’ and Co’ adventures are described in a paper by Peter Siegel in the series of “Terahertz Pioneers”, in IEEE transactions on Terahertz Science and Technology, vol.4, no. 2, March 2014, 137.

Painting by Andrea Smith

Thijs De Graauw

Sponsors

This event has received support and funding from the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Groningen; the Leids Kerkhoven-Bosscha Fonds; the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy (NOVA); the Space Research Organisation Netherlands (SRON).