Anahí Granada was also a member of the Scientific Organizing Committee. The meeting focused on OBe stars, their circumstellar disks, their single and binary evolution, and the nature of their possible stellar companions and gathered around 80 experts in the field.

OCEAN’s members presented an invited review, two oral contributions and two poster presentations with a brief oral introduction. In addition, team members participated in two round-table discussions, one devoted to the present-day companions responsible for the spin-up of Be stars and the other to the current understanding of critically rotating stars.

Overall, the participation of the four OCEANS members allowed them to present results on stellar evolution, circumstellar disks, nebulae, rotation, and speckle interferometry. It also promoted exchanges with international specialists working on different aspects of the Be phenomenon and helped to strengthen collaborations within the OCEANS network. The meeting provided a very stimulating scientific atmosphere, and was greatly enjoyed by all the team members who attended.

On July 7, 2026, Olga Maryeva from ASU and Carlos Alberto Guerrero Peña from UANL participated in the outreach event Astronomy on Tap, organized by students of Charles University in the "Respekto" bar in Prague. Olga presented the talk "My Life with the Romano Star: Notes on Luminous Blue Variables", devoted to the rare class of massive stars known as luminous blue variables in general, and to her studies of the Romano Star in particular. Carlos's talk, "Artificial Intelligence in Astrophysics: How Machines Help Us Explore the Sky", was devoted to the modern and rapidly developing field of artificial intelligence in astrophysics. The event was attended by approximately 12-15 participants, many of whom were from academic and professional backgrounds outside of astronomy. All attendees received OCEANS informational flyers.

The 10thTESS/17th Kepler Asteroseismic Science Consortium Workshop was held from 6-10 July, 2026 at Aarhus University in Denmark. The meeting brought together researchers working on OB stars, stellar populations, binaries and exoplanets, among others. Julieta Sánchez from ASU attended the workshop as an OCEANS member and contributed with a poster entitled: “Effect of Detailed Atmosphere Models on the Pulsations of Massive Stars”. The poster presented her recent work on the coupling of MESA stellar structure models with detailed CMFGEN atmosphere models to study the impact of stellar pulsations in massive stars at the pre and post RSG stages. This work is being developed in collaboration with Péter Németh from ASU and Elisson Saldanha da Gama de Almeida from ON, Brazil. The conference was attended by approximately 200 participants.

From mid-June 2026, Lic. Martina I. Tapia-Reina, PhD student at Observatorio Astronómico de Córdoba - Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (UNC-OAC), Argentina completed a fruitful 10-day research stay at the Universidad Nacional de Río Negro (UNRN), Argentina where she was hosted by Dr. Anahí Granada. During her stay she worked on the adaptation of the Barbier-Chalonge-Divan (BCD) method to study the integrated spectra of Star Clusters (SCs). For this, she used the code M.I.D.E.3700 which was developed by Dr. Yael J. Aidelman from the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP). She analyzed the behavior of these BCD parameters across different cluster ages, metallicities, and reddening conditions, and validated the method against observational integrated spectra of the LMC cluster NGC 1983 obtained from the CASLEO observatory.

On June 19, Martina delivered a public outreach presentation titled "Bajo el cielo de la Patagonia: cómo desarmar la luz para leer la historia del universo" (Under the Patagonian Sky: How to Deconstruct Light to Read the History of the Universe) at the local university, attracting a highly engaged audience.

Martina also attended a seminar on neuroscience hosted by Dr. María Da Fonseca on June 24, and she was invited to a scientific lunch, fostering a warm environment for sharing ideas, ongoing projects, and research fields among team members.

Silvina Cardenas from Universidas Nacional de La Plata (UNLP) and Gaston Escobar from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) participated at the Astronomy on Tap event on June 4th. Silvina talked about "How massive stars shape the galactic landscape" and Gaston presented "100 years of history between eclipses and black holes".

On May 21, Sergio Simón-Díaz participated in the Soñando Estrellas program on Radio Canarias, a weekly science outreach broadcast dedicated to sharing the research and staff's activities of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) with the general public. During the program, he contributed to the discussion on the IAC’s scientific and technological work and presented astrophysics topics in an accessible and engaging way for a broad radio audience. He also used the opportunity to promote the upcoming IAC Winter School.

OCEANS team members from ASU participated in the organization and implementation of the outreach event Open Days, which took place on Friday, 15 May, and Saturday, 16 May 2026, on the grounds of the Ondřejov Observatory, offering a wide range of activities for both children and adults. They distributed flyers about the OCEANS project to interested visitors, while children enjoyed painting and building rockets, posing as astronauts, and having their faces painted with spaceships, rockets, planets, and aliens. The event attracted many families and provided an excellent opportunity to popularize astronomy and present the scientific goals of the OCEANS project to the general public.

From 22 to 24 April 2026, the Cordoba Observatory hosted the workshop Stellar Evolution, Exoplanets and Stellar System Dynamics (SEEDS), which took place immediately after the OCEANS mid-term consortium meeting. An impressive number of 36 OCEANS members (left image) participated in the workshop, which was about half of the total number of participants.

Andrea V. Ahumada (UNC–OAC), Lydia S. Cidale (UNLP), Mercedes N. Gómez (UNC–OAC), Federico González (ICATE), Anahí Granada (UNRN), and Mariana Orellana (UNRN) were on the Scientific Organizing Committee (SOC - left image) and contributed to the development of the scientific concept of the meeting. The Local Organizing Committee (LOC - right image), composed entirely of OCEANS members from UNC-OAC: Andrea V. Ahumada, Leticia V. Ferrero, Luciano García, Luciana V. Gramajo, Alejandra Martinez-Bezoky, Leila Y. Saker, Federico Simondi-Romero, and Martina I. Tapia-Reina – helped to create an exceptionally friendly atmosphere while efficiently handling all organizational and technical aspects of the conference.

Four OCEANS members delivered invited talks:

In addition, 14 contributed talks were presented by OCEANS members:

And 12 posters :

Further 2 talks and 10 posters (not listed) had OCEANS members as co-authors. Moreover, Sergio Simón-Díaz (IAC) was invited to present a public lecture on "Astrophysics & Stars".

The excellently organized conference became a venue for scientific discussions, new collaborative plans, and even cheerful karaoke singing during the conference dinner.

On April 11th, the Crear Conciencia festival was organized by researchers from the Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales at the Universidad Nacional de San Juan (UNSJ). During the event, several research institutes from the province of San Juan set up booths to present their research areas and explain their impact on society to the general public.

The OCEANS member Antonio Alejo from ICATE was one of the organizers. ICATE also participated in the festival with a booth represented by OCEANS members Antonio Alejo, Ana Collado, and Federico González. The event was attended by hundreds of people of all ages.

On April 10, 2026, Nilesh Pandey, a first-year PhD student at Charles University / ASU, delivered a talk at the Meeting of Students of Astronomy and Astrophysics from Czech, Slovak, and Polish universities, held as part of the General Assembly of the Czech Astronomical Society in Plzeň (10-12 April 2026). In his presentation, titled “Characterizing Blue Supergiants using Machine Learning,” he discussed his planned PhD research. He discussed the blue supergiant problem and the need for robust statistical and data-driven approaches. The talk mainly highlighted the use of machine learning tools as well as Gaussian processes, Fourier-based methods, and neural networks on synthetic spectra and spectroscopic data from Perek 2m telescope to study wind variability and pulsations among BSGs. This work is being developed in synergy with the broader goals of the OCEANS consortium to utilise machine learning for stellar variability studies.

In the week 6-10 April 2026, several OCEANS members participated in the international conference "Friends of Friends (FoF) Meeting", held annually at the Córdoba Observatory in Argentina, where they presented the results of their recent studies. As usual, the conference took place in a friendly atmosphere and brought together around 120 researchers from different fields of astronomy and from around the world.

OCEANS members contributed with the following presentations:

On 17 March 2026, Anahí Granada (UNRN), with the support of her colleague Nicolás Maffione, organized a public talk by Olga Maryeva (ASU) for amateur astronomers in Bariloche, as well as for UNRN staff and students. Olga presented the final stages of the evolution of massive stars, with a particular focus on Luminous Blue Variables (LBVs). All attendees received OCEANS informational flyers.

As part of their outreach and educational activities, OCEANS member Sergio Simón-Díaz, from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (Spain), spent one week in March 2026 in Madrid delivering talks on stellar astrophysics to around 500 students in several high schools. The main purpose of these talks was to introduce stellar astrophysics to students who will soon need to make decisions about their future, whether pursuing university studies or vocational training.

The high schools where Sergio delivered his talks were Colegio Brains International School Arturo Soria, Lycée Français International Molière, Colegio Nuestra Señora del Pilar (Marianistas), Centro Educativo Salesianos Carabanchel, and IES Joaquín Rodrigo de Vicálvaro.

It was a highly rewarding experience in which Sergio engaged students aged between 15 and 18, explaining topics such as the difference between astronomy, astrophysics, and astrology; key milestones in the history of astronomy and astrophysics, including important contributions by women such as Hypatia, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, and Cecilia Payne; the tools used by astrophysicists; what stellar astrophysics is; and how to enjoy the journey toward becoming a stellar astrophysicist.

The plan is to repeat this initiative once or twice per year in different high schools across Spain.

On March 9, 2026, Michalis Kourniotis from ASU gave a dissemination talk at the Department of Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics of the Masaryk University, in Brno. His talk, titled as "Variability in massive stars as a diagnostic of their evolutionary stage", described the challenges in refining the physics of massive stars beyond the main sequence, and highlighted the potential of variability studies in constraining parameters from the stellar interior, atmosphere and wind for assessing the evolutionary status of these objects. Michalis further discussed his current project in collaboration with colleagues from the OCEANS consortium on applying machine-learning methods over extended star samples, as a means of revealing variability patterns that are associated with the different evolutionary scenarios.

During 06-23 Mar 2026, Andreas Sander (UHEI) and two of his group members, all part of OCEANS, had a research stay on the Mitaka Campus of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) to collaborate with Takashi Moriya and colleagues at NAOJ. The stay was focussed on the connection between massive stars and supernovae. Beside many discussions and new model explorations, the stay also included an invited review seminar talk by Andreas Sander on the concepts of stellar atmosphere modelling and what we can learn about the properties of (evolved) massive stars.

Team members from the IAC are involved in the organization and implementation of the XXXVII Canary Islands Winter School of Astrophysics that will take place 16-27 November 2026 in San Cristóbal de La Laguna (Tenerife, Spain). For more information visit the school webpage.