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Maria Werhahn honoured with the Carl Ramsauer Prize

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

Volker Springel becomes Vice President of the Astronomical Society

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

SPICE connects stellar feedback in the first galaxies and cosmic reionisation

The first billion years saw the transformation of a cold neutral Universe to a hot and ionised one. This Epoch of Reionisation is thought to come about from stellar radiation from the first galaxies. Understanding the nature of the galaxies that drove reionisation remains a key question. Scientists at MPA have designed a novel suite of simulations to systematically understand how different modes of energy and mass injection from stars affect the first galaxies. According to these new models, subtle differences in the behaviour of stellar feedback drive profound differences in the morphologies of galaxies and the speed at which they ionise the universe. Combining these findings with the latest observations will help constrain feedback models in the first billion years of the Universe. more

Looking for cracks in the standard cosmological model

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

The lingering imprint of the first cosmic structures

The universe today is host to a vast network of galaxies and an even richer array of invisible dark matter structures. But this was not always the case. The universe was nearly uniform until a time of about 100 million years, when the first cosmic structures gravitationally condensed. These objects were made of dark matter alone and each may have weighed no more than the Earth. Most of these objects do not last long: they rapidly grow and cluster together to form the much larger systems that we know today. Despite this, scientists at MPA have discovered in high-resolution simulations that some unique features of the first structures survive this process. Their lingering imprint could manifest itself in astronomical observations, yielding clues to the identity of dark matter. more

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