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

Among many X-ray sources in our Galaxy, the one called SS 433 (as an entry number 433 in the catalog of Halpha emitters by Stephenson & Sanduleak 1977) is especially famous and peculiar.  It is likely powered by a black hole in a massive binary system. The accretion rate on this black hole from its companion star is hundreds of times higher than the critical value known as the Eddington limit (when the pressure of produced radiation becomes so great that it can eject matter and form powerful “winds” of the accretion disk). The new model discusses the impact of such winds on the surrounding interstellar medium. In particular, this wind can inflate the giant W50 nebula, encompassing SS 433 and spanning tens of parsecs in size. A similar situation may occur for rapidly growing massive black holes at the dawn of the Universe, galaxies with extreme nucleus activity and star formation rates during the “Cosmic Noon” (when the Universe was about 2-3 billion years old), or in the most extreme ultraluminous X-ray sources in normal star-forming galaxies today. more

Valeriya Korol, a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA), has been selected to join the LISA Science Team to help ESA shape the scientific potential of its flagship and first-of-its-kind gravitational-wave mission, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). She is the only early career scientist to be selected for the panel. more

MPA researcher proposes a new idea to detect pairs of the biggest black holes, which occupies the centres of galaxies, by analysing gravitational waves from nearby small black holes, which are the remnants of stars. This approach, now published in Nature Astronomy, which will require a deci-Hz gravitational-wave detector, would enable studying supermassive black hole binaries, which might remain inaccessible otherwise.
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With the recent advancements in the Lyman-alpha observations, it becomes more and more important to have theoretical models to help us decode the intricate Lyman-alpha spectral line. Scientists at MPA developed a theoretical approach to describe the escape of Lyman-alpha from scenarios where there is an empty hole to emulate the porous gas around galaxies. more

Can machine learning make new discoveries in astrophysics? An ‘explainable’ neural network is employed to get insights into the origin of dark matter halo density profiles. The network discovers that the shape of the profile in the halo outskirts is described by a single parameter related to the most recent accretion of mass. This is done without prior knowledge of the halo’s evolution history being provided during training.
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