Galaxies are not islands in the cosmos. While globally the universe expands – driven by the mysterious ‘dark energy’ – locally, galaxies cluster through gravitational interactions, forming the cosmic web held together by dark matter’s gravity. For cosmologists, galaxies are test particles to study gravity, dark matter and dark energy. For the first time, MPA researchers and alumni have now used a novel method that fully exploits all information in galaxy maps and applied it to simulated but realistic datasets. Their study demonstrates that this new method will provide a much more stringent test of the cosmological standard model, and has the potential to shed new light on gravity and the dark universe. more

ERC Synergy grant will fund researchers at MPA, the Observatories of Rome and Trieste in Italy, and Chalmers in Sweden to unravel the complexity of the Epoch of Reionization. more

European Research Council funds scientists at MPA, RTWH Aachen, and IA-FORTH to map Galaxy in 3D more

New observations by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) of more than one million solar masses were already present only 450 million years after the Big Bang. How did these first SMBHs form? A team of researchers at MPA has used modern supercomputer simulations to show that progenitors of SMBHs (seeds) of a few thousand solar masses can form rapidly in dense and structured star clusters forming in the early Universe. They emerge from collisions of massive stars which form supermassive stars and then collapse directly into black holes, which can further grow by merging with other black holes. This new and more realistic model resembles JWST observations and can explain the formation of SMBH seeds which are massive enough to further grow into the earliest SMBHs observed. For this SMBH seed formation process, the researchers predict a unique gravitational wave fingerprint from black hole merger that can be directly tested with the next-generation gravitational wave observatories. more

In early 2024, the European Space Agency officially adopted the LISA mission (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) as the world’s first space-based gravitational wave observatory, with its launch set for 2035. LISA will provide a revolutionary view into the Universe by capturing gravitational waves in a frequency range inaccessible to ground-based detectors, allowing scientists to study entirely new astrophysical phenomena. As LISA opens this unexplored window, it poses exciting challenges for the astrophysics community, which must now focus on identifying the scientific questions that LISA will answer and developing the tools to do so. From November 5 to 7, 2024, more than a 100 researchers will gather at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA) in Garching bei München to participate in the LISA Astrophysics Working Group Meeting, where they will explore how LISA can deepen our understanding of black holes, stars, galaxies, and other astrophysical objects across the Universe. more

The Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA) is proud to announce that Dr. Max Gronke, leader of the Max Planck Research Group 'Multiphase Gas', has been awarded a highly competitive European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant. This prestigious grant will fund Dr. Gronke's innovative research project "Resolving the Multiscale, Multiphase Universe" (ReMMU) over the next five years. more

The groundbreaking detections of gravitational waves from merging pairs of black holes have left us with an intriguing question: how do black holes get close enough to merge? Scientists at MPA show that some of them may have started out as massive stars orbiting one another at extremely large separations — 1,000 to 10,000 times the distance between Earth and Sun. Once these stars end their lives and form black holes, the gravity of the entire galaxy in which they reside could slowly deform the shape of their orbit leading to a close encounter and merger of the black holes. more