Motivation and scientific rationale

With the landmark of Jo Puls retiring from institutional duties, followed and preceded by many other colleagues who were active early-career researchers in the field of hot luminous star in Munich in the exciting early 1980s, we are pleased to announce the celebration of the conference

Munichfest2025: celebrating 40 years of research on hot luminous stars

which will take place in La Palma (Canary Islands, Spain) during the week of April 7-11, 2025.

Our motivation for organizing this conference is manifold:

• Scientific Perspective: We aim to comprehensively review the progress made in the field over the past four decades, particularly focusing on topics investigated by those who pursued their PhD or postdoc in Munich during the early 1980s or had connections with them.

• Career Tribute: We wish to honour the contributions of all those individuals who laid the groundwork for the advancements we are currently making in the field of quantitative spectroscopy of massive stars. Indeed, the Munich School has been one of the fundamental pillars to the development of radiation-driven wind theory as we know it.

• Personal Connection: Beyond the scientific aspect, we aspire to create a welcoming environment where our colleagues, along with their scientific families and friends, can come together to share memories and experiences.

• New frontiers in massive star research: We will also reserve ample time for discussion of the new challenges we have in front of us, motivated by (1) the discovery of new exciting observing phenomena associated with the single and binary evolution of massive stars across cosmic time; (2) the need to develop efficient strategies to extract information from the vast amount of new spectra of massive OB-type stars delivered by on-going large-scale surveys, (3) the increasing availability of computers powerful enough to perform 3D-model computations in reasonable time-scales.

Scientific topics and conference organization

There will be 8 topical sessions (TS), with 1 or 2 keynote/invited talks. Keynote/invited speakers have been kindly requested to use part of the allocated time to provide a historical overview on the topic.

• TS1: Radiation driven winds

• TS2: Stellar atmosphere/wind modeling

• TS3: Quantitative spectroscopy (I): OB-type stars

• TS4: Quantitative spectroscopy (II): WRs, LBVs, CSPN

• TS5: Massive star evolution

• TS6: Atmospheres and winds in binaries

• TS7: Additional views of massive stars: asteroseismology / variability / X-rays / magnetic fields / interferometry

• TS8: Hot massive stars as tools for Galactic and extragalactic stellar astronomy

In addition, there will be occasion to discuss recent developments and future prospects in topics related to the TSs, in 4 round table (RT) sessions.

• RT1: Atmosphere + wind modelling (1D/3D, time-dependence, non-spherical geometries, clumping)

• RT2: Spectroscopic analyses (large surveys, automatic analyses, machine learning, atomic data)

• RT3: Evolution (singles / binaries / triples, incl. formation)

• RT4: Future prospects (low Z, gravitational wave events, transients, unresolved populations, JWST, ELT)

The scientific program will be completed with contributed talks (20 min). Participants may also contribute with posters and/or brief pre-recorded talks of up to two minutes which will be posted in the conference webpage.