By Charles (Chuck) Steidel, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California more

LISA, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, has passed a major review with flying colours: the entire concept – from the definition of the overall mission and operations to the space hardware to be built – stood up to the intense scrutiny of ESA´s reviewers. Now the space agency´s Science Programme Committee (SPC) has confirmed that LISA is sufficiently mature and that mission development can proceed as planned. LISA should go into orbit in the mid-2030s. more

In a hypothetical scenario, small, primordial black holes could be captured by newly forming stars. An international team, led by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, has now modelled the evolution of these so-called “Hawking stars” and found that they can have surprisingly long lifetimes, resembling normal stars in many aspects. Asteroseismology could help to identify such stars, which in turn could test the existence of primordial black holes and their role as a component for dark matter. more

MPA postdoc Maria Werhahn has been awarded the Carl Ramsauer Prize by the Physikalische Gesellschaft zu Berlin for her doctoral thesis “Simulating Galaxy Evolution with Cosmic Rays: The Multi-Frequency View”. The award ceremony took place on 22 November 2023 at the Technical University of Berlin, where she also presented her work in a short lecture. more

At its 2023 Annual Meeting, the German Astronomical Society elected Volker Springel, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics as Vice President. more

The award panel unanimously decided to bestow the 2023 Rudolf Kippenhahn Award on Dr. Laura Herold for her groundbreaking paper titled “New Constraint on Early Dark Energy from Planck and BOSS data using the Profile Likelihood”. Her contributions have already been very impactful in the field. more

New computer simulations follow the formation of galaxies and the cosmic large-scale structure with unprecedented statistical precision more