MPA News 2025

For her excellent graduate studies, Claude Cournoyer-Cloutier, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, received the Governor General’s Academic Gold Medal at the McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada at the end of November. more

The School of Frontier Science at Nanjing University has announced the appointment of Prof. Dr. Marat Gilfanov, Senior Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA), as a Distinguished Guest Professor. Currently, Gilfanov is working with the Nanjing scientists on a joint project studying intermediate mass black holes (IMBHs). more

An international team of astronomers has found a low mass dark object in the distant Universe, not by directly observing any emitted light, but by detecting its tiny gravitational distortion of the light from another distant galaxy. This mysterious object has a mass of about one million times that of our Sun, and its discovery seems consistent with the current best theory about how galaxies like our own Milky Way formed. more

A new study led by Dr. Alankar Dutta at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics uncovers why cold gas clouds fail to thrive in powerful winds flowing out of galaxies driven by supernovae. These findings, soon to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, challenge long standing assumptions about how galaxies exchange matter with their surroundings.
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During the MPA garden party, the Rudolf-Kippenhahn-Prize for the best scientific paper written in the past year by a student at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics was awarded to two students: Silvia Almada Monter for “Crossing walls and windows: the curious escape of Lyman-α photons through ionized channels” and Christian Partmann for “The importance of nuclear star clusters for massive black hole growth and nuclear star formation in simulated low-mass galaxies”. The prize is awarded to recognize originality, a large impact on science but also the quality of writing for a publication to which students themselves made substantial contributions. more

In the first study of its kind, researchers at the RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS) in Japan, together with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA) and the Flatiron Institute, used machine learning — a form of artificial intelligence — to significantly speed up the processing time to simulate the evolution of galaxies coupled with supernova explosions. This approach could help us to understand the origins of our own galaxy and, in particular, the elements essential for life in the Milky Way. more

Computer simulations suggest that the amplification of magnetic fields in stellar collisions may play an important role in the formation of a particular subset of stars in clusters. Blue straggler stars in clusters appear not only bluer, but also younger than other cluster members. One proposed explanation for their apparently different ages is that they are the result of stellar collisions. However, this would require the resulting star to spin down efficiently without losing too much mass. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics have now shown, using sophisticated 3D simulations, that the energy of the magnetic field is greatly amplified in the collisions of low-mass stars, providing a potentially efficient spin-down mechanism. more