News at MPA

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

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

The award panel unanimously decided to bestow the 2023 Rudolf Kippenhahn Award on Dr. Laura Herold for her groundbreaking paper titled “New Constraint on Early Dark Energy from Planck and BOSS data using the Profile Likelihood”. Her contributions have already been very impactful in the field. more

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

Thirty years ago, astronomers realized that the X-ray emission from giant molecular clouds might in fact be the reflection of a powerful flare from the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* at the center of our Milky Way that happened a few hundred years ago. Theory predicts several unique features of such X-ray emission, including a hard spectrum with a bright iron fluorescent line, apparent superluminal motions, and polarization of the continuum. All but polarization had been detected over the past 30 years by many X-ray observatories. X-ray polarization was lagging behind for a good reason – there were no X-ray polarimetric missions sensitive enough to address this problem. Until recently… more

What do radiation biology, radio astronomy and cosmic ray measurements have in common? For one thing, radiation occurs in all of them. For another, all of these fields are explored using large-scale research facilities and require intelligent algorithms to visualize the quantities that occur in the process. In order to advance this imaging in an interdisciplinary way, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is now funding the project "Information Field Theory for Experiments at Large-scale Research Facilities". Seven German universities, the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA) and Erium GmbH, founded by former MPA students, are involved. more

Galaxies are the birthplace of most stars and black holes. However, scientists are still debating, how galaxies accrete the fuel to sustain their growth, and how they in turn pollute their environment with elements heavier than helium. An international team of astrophysicists has now directly observed the neighborhood of a massive galaxy in the early universe. They find that the gas all around the galaxy is enriched with heavy elements, which means it has been polluted by the galaxy itself and by embedded satellite galaxies. Furthermore, this gas is spiraling onto the massive galaxy, fueling further star formation. more