News

Does the mysterious dark matter experience gravity in the same way as ordinary matter? A team of scientists from MPA and the University of Geneva (Switzerland) has developed a new method to answer this question by measuring the time dilation in galaxy clusters. With future datasets, this method could detect violations of the equivalence principle at the level of a few percent. more

This year, the Astronomical Society of Japan (ASJ) awarded the ‘Young Astronomer Award’ to MPA postdoc Sunmyon Chon for his work on “Theoretical Studies on the Evolution of the Initial Mass Function of Low-metallicity Stars in the Early Universe”. The ASJ highlighted “his significant contributions to theoretical astrophysics, particularly regarding star formation in the early universe, a topic he has advanced through simulations using the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan's supercomputer ATERUI II.” more

Eric Rohr came to MPA to benefit from the numerical and scientific expertise here, and was not expecting the full programme of social events.  more

Sun-like stars form within turbulent molecular clouds, encircled by disks of gas and dust - the birthplaces of planets. While the earliest phases of the disk assembly process are obscured by the surrounding dense gas, ALMA can observe proto-stellar disks shortly after their formation. In a project supported by the Excellence Cluster ORIGINS, researchers from MPA, MPE, Harvard, and the University of Cologne performed high-resolution non-ideal magneto-hydrodynamical simulations that self-consistently follow proto-stellar disk formation from their parental turbulent molecular clouds down to stellar scales, spanning over 10 orders of magnitude. The study uncovers the complex paths by which disks assemble and demonstrates that magnetic fields play a central role in their formation and early evolution.
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A pan-European group of astronomers has used newly developed computer technology to solve a 100 year-old puzzle. While most galaxies in our neighborhood move away from us almost as expected for an unperturbed cosmic expansion, our nearest giant neighbour is approaching at high speed. Systematic numerical experimentation demonstrates this rapid approach is due to massive dark matter haloes surrounding both Andromeda and our own Milky Way, but this mass does not slow down somewhat more distant galaxies because its effects are counteracted by more distant dark matter which lies in a vast flattened sheet out to distances well beyond the neighboring galaxies considered.   more