MPA News 2018

The telescope is scheduled to begin operation in 2021, enabling new insights into the ‘cosmic dawn’ – the birth of stars after the Big Bang – and the formation of stars and galaxies. The Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA) contributes to the construction of the telescope and MPA scientists will use the data to investigate the very early Universe. more

Bernhard Flierl (LMU) and Titouan Lazeyras (MPA)are awarded the Universe PhD Award 2018 of the Cluster of Excellence Universe for their outstanding dissertations. The award ceremony will take place during the Science Week 2018 of the Universe Cluster (3. - 6.12.2018). more

Inspired by a lecture on information field theory, two former MPA PhD students founded the successful start-up IPT. Honouring this kind of knowledge transfer, both, the company founders and their former supervisor now received the Hochsprung Award presented by the Entrepreneurship Network of Bavarian Universities on October 17. more

The 2018 MPA summer party was not only a special thank you to this year’s Biermann lecturer Alice Shapley, UCLA, but also the occasion to congratulate two junior MPA scientists to their Kippenhahn Awards. Aniket Agrawal was honoured for his paper on “Large tensor non-Gaussianity from axion-gauge field dynamics”. Jens Stücker received the award for his paper “The median density of the Universe”. more

Professor Rashid Sunyaev, Director-emeritus of the Max-Planck-Institute for astrophysics has been awarded the 2018 Marcel Grossmann Award. more

By Professor Alice Shapley, UCLA, Dept. of Physics and Astronomy more

Last week the Gruber foundation announced that this year’s cosmology prize is awarded to the Planck team, which includes scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA). From 2009 to 2013 the European Space Agency’s Planck observatory collected data that has provided cosmology with the definitive description of the universe on the largest and smallest scales. “These measurements,” the Gruber Prize citation reads, “have led to the determination of cosmological parameters (matter content, geometry, and evolution of the universe) to unprecedented precision.” more