VFTS Collaboration Meeting

This meeting is the 16th in a series of meetings which began in 2007 with the start of the observations of the VLT-FLAMES Tarantula Survey (VFTS, PI: C. Evans). The VFTS is a large-scale multi-epoch spectroscopic survey carried out with the FLAMES spectrograph at the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory in Paranal Observatory, Chile. Targeting over 900 massive stars in the 30 Doradus region, a young star-forming complex of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), the VFTS provided an unprecedented data set of multi-epoch observations of the stellar content of 30 Dor. The high-quality multi-epoch data enabled the homogeneous characterization of a large number of massive stars in terms of effective temperatures, surface gravities and rotation rates of stars and the determination of the present-day bias-corrected binary fraction. The obtained parameters allowed to answer key questions about the evolution of massive stars and provided crucial input for models of star and cluster formation.

 

While the observations are long finished, the data are analysed, and over 30 papers are published, the ever-growing VFTS collaboration, which is now a collaboration of 'VFTS & Friends', still meets annually to continue working on the data, to think of new ideas, to plan new projects, and to corroborate existing collaborations. The meeting, which aims to bring together the extended VFTS collaboration and is otherwise open upon explicit invitation, will be designed in an open format and serves as a platform for young scientists.