MPA News 2022

On November 17, the German Physical Society announced that it will award the Max Planck Medal, its highest award in Theoretical Physics, to Rashid Sunyaev. Thus the DPG honours “his numerous and fundamental contributions to relativistic astrophysics and to cosmology, in particular for the theoretical prediction of experimentally observed changes in the spectrum of cosmic background radiation passing through galaxy clusters.” more

The Nishina Memorial Foundation announced this week that Professor Eiichiro Komatsu, director at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, receives the most prestigious Japanese physics award. The Nishina Memorial Prize is presented annually, honoring outstanding Japanese scientists who have made substantial contributions to physics research. Komatsu receives the prestigious award for his “contributions to the standard cosmology based on the cosmic microwave background”. The award will be presented during a ceremony in Tokyo on 6 December 2022. more

Former MPA research group leader Sherry Suyu has been selected as a Max Planck Fellow to complement her recent appointment as associate professor at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). For the next five years, she will continue to lead a small working group at MPA to use gravitational lensing as a probe of cosmology and astrophysics. more

The Partner Group of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics at Kyambogo University in Uganda will be led by MPA scientist Dr. Benard Nsamba. The Max Planck Society will support the partner group for up to a period of five years with 20,000 Euros every year. With these funds, Dr. Nsamba will build a research group in Astrophysics at Kyambogo University in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, covering expenses for travel, workshops, doctoral students and postdocs as well as minor equipment. more

Today, the German Astronomical Society announced that Hans-Thomas Janka will receive the Karl Schwarzschild Medal, the most prestigious prize in Germany in the field of astronomy and astrophysics. The medal honours his research on the core-collapse supernova mechanism, explosive nucleosynthesis, and supernova neutrino physics. more

Using the first science image released by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) this month, an international team of scientists led by the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics has built an improved model for the mass distribution of the galaxy cluster SMACS J0723.3−7327. They used dozens of multiple images of far-away background galaxies revealed in the JWST image, some of which were too faint to be detected previously. Acting as a so-called gravitational lens, the foreground galaxy cluster produces both multiple images of background galaxies and magnifies these images. One family of such multiple images belongs to a galaxy, which the model predicts to be at a distance of about 13 Gyrs, i.e. whose light travelled some 13 billion years before reaching the telescope. If confirmed, this will emphasise the importance of accurate gravitational lens models for the identification of distant galaxies and their detailed study. more

During this year’s summer barbeque, MPA student Pavan Vynatheya was distinguished with the Kippenhahn Award for his paper on “How Important is Secular Evolution for Black Hole and Neutron Star Mergers in 2+2 and 3+1 Quadruple-star Systems?” more