News at MPA

The Max Planck Society has appointed Simona Vegetti at MPA to head a Lise Meitner Excellence Group. Simona Vegetti will use strong gravitational lensing observations to measure the abundance and structural properties of dark matter haloes and thereby provide clean observational constraints on the nature of dark matter. As part of the programme, the group is endowed with an internationally competitive budget for material and human resources. more

Galaxy clusters are dynamic systems that grow by continuously accreting large and small chunks of matter. This accretion process should give rise to a rich substructure in the dark matter distribution within the clusters and to shocks and “cold fronts” in the hot baryonic gas. Recent SRG/eROSITA observations provided an unprecedented X-ray view of the Coma cluster, revealing intricate signatures of the merger process, which are predicted by numerical simulations. more

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