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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

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

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

Matter in intergalactic space is distributed in a vast network of interconnected filamentary structures, collectively referred to as the cosmic web. With hundreds of hours of observations, an international team of researchers has now obtained an unprecedented high-definition image of a cosmic filament inside this web, connecting two active forming galaxies – dating back to when the Universe was about 2 billion years old. more