All News (2011 - ...)

On 8 January 2021, the société astronomique de France (the French Astronomical Society – SAF) awarded the Jules Janssen Prize to Dr. Ewine F. van Dishoeck, External Scientific Member of the MPE, for her outstanding scientific achievements. more

The Max Planck director is honoured for his observations of the black hole in the galactic center more

There has never been anything like it: Reinhard Genzel received the Nobel Prize certificate and medal on 8.12.2020 in a festive ceremony at the State Chancellery in Munich. more

Gigantic hot gas structures above and below the Galactic disc are probably due to shock waves generated by past energetic activity in the centre of our Galaxy. more

The project "DarkQuest: Shedding Light on the Nature of Dark Matter and Dark Energy with Multi-Wavelength All-Sky Surveys" led by Esra Bulbul at MPE is being funded by an ERC Consolidator grant for the next five years. Taking advantage of the eROSITA survey data, she aims to constrain dark energy and dark matter models. more

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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

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Stellar systems like our own form inside interstellar clouds of gas and dust that collapse producing young stars surrounded by protoplanetary disks. Planets form within these protoplanetary disks, leaving clear gaps, which have been recently observed in evolved systems, at the time when the mother cloud has been cleared out. ALMA has now revealed an evolved protoplanetary disk with a large gap still being fed by the surrounding cloud via large accretion filaments. This shows that accretion of material onto the protoplanetary disk is continuing for times longer than previously thought, affecting the evolution of the future planetary system. more

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s fifth generation collected its very first observations of the cosmos at 1:47 a.m. on October 24, 2020. As the world's first all-sky time-domain spectroscopic survey, SDSS-V will provide insight into the formation and evolution of galaxies—like like our own Milky Way—and of the supermassive black holes that lurk at their centers. The data provided by SDSS-V will be an important complement to the X-ray all-sky data from eROSITA. more

Pope Francis has named the winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics Prof. Reinhard Genzel to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. The Vatican announced this news a few days after the Nobel announcement. more

On 14 October, German Federal Minister of Research Anja Karliczek and Bavaria's Minister of Science Bernd Sibler personally congratulated MPE Director Reinhard Genzel on receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics. more