The WMAP science team has received the 2018 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for detailed maps of the early universe that greatly improved our knowledge of the evolution of the cosmos and the fluctuations that seeded the formation of galaxies. The prize will be shared among the entire 27-member WMAP science team including Eiichiro Komatsu, director at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching.
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Dr. Eleonore Trefftz, Emeritus Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Garching, passed away on 22 October 2017 at the age of 97. With Eleonore Trefftz, the Max Planck Society loses a remarkable researcher and person.
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Two junior MPA scientists receive the Kippenhahn Award for the best MPA student publication in 2016. Titouan Lazeyras receives the prize for his paper "Large-scale assembly bias of dark matter halos" which presents high-precision measurements of halo assembly bias. Dijana Vrbanec was awarded for her paper "Predictions for the 21 cm-galaxy cross-power spectrum observable with LOFAR and Subaru"; finding that a clear anti-correlation should be seen on scales larger than the typical separation distance between galaxy clusters.
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On 17 August 2017, two merging neutron stars were seen for the first time by their gravitational wave signal as well as high-energy gamma radiation. This simultaneous observation confirms that merging neutron stars are indeed the progenitors of short Gamma-Ray Bursts. Follow-up observations revealed light emission powered by the radioactive decay of heavy elements – a so-called kilonova, confirming theoretical predictions, also by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, that these kinds of stellar collisions can be the cosmic origin of heavy elements such as gold and platinum.
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From 1st October 2017, Volker Springel is a new director at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics and head of the "Numerical Astrophysics" department, initially with a partial appointment and from 1st August 2018 full-time. The theoretical astrophysicist, whose main research focus is on structure formation in the Universe and the simulation of galaxies, returns to Garching and the institute where his scientific career began.
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An international team of scientists from the Monash University (Melbourne, Australia), the Towson and Pittsburgh Universities (USA) and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, has shed new light on the origins of the famous Tycho’s supernova. The research, published in Nature Astronomy, debunks the common view that Tycho’s supernova originated from a white dwarf, which had been slowly accreting matter from its companion in a binary system.
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