EDGE Science Meeting
          IAC Headerquarters, La Laguna, Tenerife (Spain)
         8-10 July 2026

About the Meeting

The EDGE Science Meeting 2026 will bring together the international collaboration working on the Extragalactic Database for Galaxy Evolution (EDGE) — a combined optical integral field unit (IFU) and molecular gas database of nearby galaxies, compiled through a series of dedicated observational campaigns at facilities including CARMA, APEX, the Atacama Compact Array (ACA), and the Green Bank Telescope (GBT). EDGE measures kpc-scale molecular gas distributions and kinematics in galaxies with pre-existing IFU observations, enabling a comprehensive study of the processes that regulate star formation and drive galaxy evolution in the local Universe.

The meeting will serve as a focal point for collaboration members involved in observations, data reduction, database development, and the scientific exploitation of EDGE data. It will also welcome researchers working on related topics in interstellar medium physics, star formation, and galaxy evolution, particularly those from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna community.

Scientific Context

EDGE was launched in 2015 with the CARMA-EDGE survey, which provided CO(1–0) and ¹³CO(1–0) interferometric observations of 126 infrared-bright galaxies drawn from the CALIFA IFU survey (Bolatto et al. 2017). Over the past decade, the collaboration has expanded through complementary observational programs — APEX-EDGE, ACA-EDGE, and GBT-EDGE — growing into the integrated EDGE (iEDGE) database, which now provides homogenized molecular gas and stellar population measurements for 643 galaxies, with stellar masses spanning ~10⁹–10¹¹·⁵ M☉, star formation rates covering four orders of magnitude, and molecular gas masses ranging from ~10⁷ to 10¹¹ M☉ (Colombo et al. 2025).

With more than 20 refereed publications to date, EDGE has produced key results on the spatially resolved star formation law, molecular gas depletion timescales across the Hubble sequence, AGN feedback and central gas depletion as a quenching mechanism, the role of bars, spiral arms, and galaxy interactions in driving molecular gas concentration, and the evolution of galaxies through the green valley. The GBT-EDGE survey — the most recent addition to the program — completed observations in 2025, and the corresponding data release paper is currently under review. This meeting marks the tenth anniversary of the first EDGE-CALIFA collaboration meeting held at the University of Maryland in April 2015.

Purpose and Goals

The 2026 Science Meeting will provide a unique opportunity to:

Format and Venue

The meeting will adopt a hybrid format (in-person and online) to ensure broad international participation. It will span three days (Wednesday–Friday), hosted at the IAC headquarters in La Laguna, Tenerife. The program will include plenary review talks, contributed presentations, and dedicated working sessions for ongoing EDGE projects. A visit to the Pico del Ingles Wiki and a social lunch at the sea-shore in Punta Hidalgo wiki, so be prepared to swim, if you like

Organization and Support

The event is co-organized by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), the University of Maryland, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Instituto de Astronomía of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (IA-UNAM). The EDGE collaboration is led by Alberto Bolatto (University of Maryland) and Tony Wong (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), together with Sebastián Sánchez (IAC / IA-UNAM). Further institutional and logistical support is provided by local organizing committee members at the IAC.

Further details on registration, accommodation, and travel logistics will be provided through the conference website as they become available. For enquiries, contact the local organizing committee at the IAC.