News at MPA

The first all-sky survey performed by the eROSITA X-ray telescope on-board the SRG observatory has revealed a large hourglass-shaped structure in the Milky Way. These “eROSITA bubbles” show a striking similarity to the Fermi bubbles, detected a decade ago at even higher energies. The most likely explanation for these huge features is a massive energy injection from the Galactic centre region in the past, leading to shocks in the hot gaseous halo around our galaxy. more

Selma E. de Mink appointed as director at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics more

Asifa Akhtar and Volker Springel are honoured with the 2021 Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation more

The German Research Foundation DFG announced today that Volker Springel, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, will receive the most important research award in Germany: together with nine other scientists, he will receive the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize 2021 for his ground-breaking work in the field of numerical astrophysics. more

Three years into its quest to reveal the nature of dark energy, the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) is on track to complete the largest map of the cosmos ever. The team will create a three-dimensional map of 2.5 million galaxies that will help astronomers understand how and why the expansion of the universe is speeding up over time. Scientists in Munich and Garching have contributed to the design of the survey strategy, planning and execution as well as developing key software and data management tools for the cosmology data analysis. more

Using Planck data from the cosmic microwave background radiation, an international team of researchers has observed a hint of new physics. The team developed a new method to measure the polarization angle of the ancient light by calibrating it with dust emission from our own Milky Way. While the signal is not detected with enough precision to draw definite conclusions, it may suggest that dark matter or dark energy causes a violation of the so-called “parity symmetry”. more

Emeritus Scientific Member and former Director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics more