Extracting cosmological information from galaxy surveys is a difficult task – one to which MPA researchers are now one step closer. Using a theoretical framework known as effective field theory combined with a novel statistical approach, they were able to correctly recover the input cosmology based on a catalog of simplified simulated galaxies. more

On 6 May 2020, the Gruber Foundation announced that Volker Springel, managing director at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, receives the 2020 Gruber Cosmology Prize along with Lars Hernquist, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, for their defining contributions to cosmological simulations. This method tests existing theories of, and inspires new investigations into the formation of structures at every scale from stars to galaxies to the universe itself. The award recognizes their transformative work on structure formation in the universe, and development of numerical algorithms and community codes further used by many other researchers to significantly advance the field. more

About 10 billion years ago, a galaxy smashed into our cosmic home, the Milky Way, in a violent “merger” event that changed the way the Galaxy looks. Researchers from MPA together with international collaborators from the UK, Chile and Italy, have managed to piece together the impact of this event using the largest and most sophisticated simulations of the Milky Way to date. In particular, they found that the damage inflicted on the Galaxy in its youth is commensurate with a satellite that weights about a billion Suns. more

On 27 April 2020, the US National Academy of Sciences announced that MPA managing director Volker Springel is among the 26 newly elected international members in recognition of his distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Membership is a widely accepted mark of excellence in science, especially as the "bar" for electing Foreign Associates is supposed to be quite high, particularly for well-represented countries such as Germany. more

X-ray astronomers and astrophysicists in Russia and Germany working from their home offices with the Spectrum RG orbital observatory have reached an important milestone – the ART XC and eROSITA telescopes aboard Spectrum RG completed a map of half of the sky. more

Warm, cold, just right? The analysis of seven strongly gravitationally lensed quasars gives new clues about the temperature of dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up about a quarter of our universe. The results put a lower limit on the mass of a potential dark matter particle while not ruling out cold dark matter. more

A new model of galaxy formation will help scientists to better understand the distribution of gas and stars within galaxies. Researchers from the MPA in Garching, along with collborators from Switzerland, China, the UK, and Iceland have come together to release L-GALAXIES 2020, the latest version of the L-GALAXIES model project, a computational simulation designed to study many millions of galaxies simultaneously, each self-consistently evolved over billions of years of cosmic time. more