MPA News 2024

The MPG Commission »Quality Management of Max Planck Gender Equality Plans (GEP)« awarded the Gold label to MPA’s plan, for meeting  the Max Planck standards – comprehensiveness, institute-specific and sustainability – to an outstanding degree. The MPA presents an excellent gender equality strategy, which, among other things, impresses with a comprehensive inventory, a stringent, data-based selection of fields of action, goals and measures, and a comprehensive portfolio of measures. more

ERC Synergy grant will fund researchers at MPA, the Observatories of Rome and Trieste in Italy, and Chalmers in Sweden to unravel the complexity of the Epoch of Reionization. more

European Research Council funds scientists at MPA, RTWH Aachen, and IA-FORTH to map Galaxy in 3D more

In early 2024, the European Space Agency officially adopted the LISA mission (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) as the world’s first space-based gravitational wave observatory, with its launch set for 2035. LISA will provide a revolutionary view into the Universe by capturing gravitational waves in a frequency range inaccessible to ground-based detectors, allowing scientists to study entirely new astrophysical phenomena. As LISA opens this unexplored window, it poses exciting challenges for the astrophysics community, which must now focus on identifying the scientific questions that LISA will answer and developing the tools to do so. From November 5 to 7, 2024, more than a 100 researchers will gather at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA) in Garching bei München to participate in the LISA Astrophysics Working Group Meeting, where they will explore how LISA can deepen our understanding of black holes, stars, galaxies, and other astrophysical objects across the Universe. more

The Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA) is proud to announce that Dr. Max Gronke, leader of the Max Planck Research Group 'Multiphase Gas', has been awarded a highly competitive European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant. This prestigious grant will fund Dr. Gronke's innovative research project "Resolving the Multiscale, Multiphase Universe" (ReMMU) over the next five years. more

Valeriya Korol, a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA), has been selected to join the LISA Science Team to help ESA shape the scientific potential of its flagship and first-of-its-kind gravitational-wave mission, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). She is the only early career scientist to be selected for the panel. more

MPA researcher proposes a new idea to detect pairs of the biggest black holes, which occupies the centres of galaxies, by analysing gravitational waves from nearby small black holes, which are the remnants of stars. This approach, now published in Nature Astronomy, which will require a deci-Hz gravitational-wave detector, would enable studying supermassive black hole binaries, which might remain inaccessible otherwise.
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