The primary focus of the White Papers should be to give an overview of the scientific questions of interest to ESO's astronomical community in the 2040s and beyond.
The White Papers should:
Transforming With the European Southern Observatory's Extremely Large Telescope (ESO's ELT) construction just a few years from completion, the science community is preparing to observe with the world's biggest eye on the sky later this decade. At the same time, ESO continue to enable scientists worldwide to discover the secrets of the Universe with it's world-class observatories on the ground, including the flagship facility the Very Large Telescope (VLT), the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) and, together with ESO's international partners, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the future Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTA).
ESO is already looking beyond the ELT and setting our sights on the next facility that will revolutionise the global astronomical landscape. You can find here the relevant link.
The European Interferometry Initiative is steering the community response to the ESO Expanding Horizons. The kick-off was the Expanding Horizons for Optical Longbaseline Interferometry Workshop in Paris in January 2025.