MPE Press Releases (2005 - ...)

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

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

Emmanuelle Charpentier honoured with the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Reinhard Genzel wins Nobel Prize in Physics more

ALMA shows rings around the still-growing proto-star IRS 63 more