News at MPA

The best student publications at MPA in 2019 are two supernova papers: Andeas Flörs is awarded with the Rudolf-Kippenhahn-Prize for his paper entitled “Sub- Chandrasekhar progenitors favoured for Type Ia supernovae: evidence from late-time spectroscopy” and Simon Huber for his paper on “Strongly lensed SNe Ia in the era of LSST: observing cadence for lens discoveries and time-delay measurements”. more

Carlos S. Frenk, Julio F. Navarro and Simon D.M. White have been named Clarivate Citation Laureates for 2020 for their fundamental studies of galaxy formation and evolution, cosmic structure, and dark matter halos. The theoretical astrophysicists are among 24 new Citation Laureates with significant contributions in one of the four Nobel Prize areas named this year. more

Prof. Dragan Huterer currently is spending his sabbatical from the University of Michigan in the cosmology group at MPA. Funded through the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award of the Humboldt Foundation, he hopes to find new inspiration for studying the expansion history of the universe as well as having the time to write a cosmology textbook. more

Computer simulation reveals similar structures for large and small dark matter halos more

Astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), have revealed an extremely distant and therefore very young galaxy that looks surprisingly like our Milky Way. The galaxy is so far away its light has taken more than 12 billion years to reach us: we see it as it was when the Universe was just 1.4 billion years old. It is also surprisingly unchaotic, contradicting theories that all galaxies in the early Universe were turbulent and unstable. This unexpected discovery challenges our understanding of how galaxies form, giving new insights into the past of our Universe. more

Astronomers use a gravitational lens to find the most distant disk galaxy more

Two teams of astronomers have made a compelling case in the 33-year-old mystery surrounding Supernova 1987A. Based on observations with ALMA and a theoretical follow-up study, the scientists provide new insight for the argument that a neutron star is hiding deep inside the remains of the exploded star. This would be the youngest neutron star in our cosmic neighbourhood known to date. more