“The Wide-field Spectroscopic Telescope — WST”
I will present the WST project, conceived as a state-of-the-art spectroscopic facility intended to provide a critital capability currently absent from the global astronomical infrastructur. WST is envisioned to play a foundational role in astronmy for the next 50 years or so. The project will be submitted to the ESO Expanding Horizons call in 2027. I will also review several of the scientific cases for WST, spanning a wide range of physical scales and serving a broad and diverse astronomical community.