MPE Press Releases (2005 - ...)

The Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (ERIS), a science instrument which was built by a consortium under the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, has successfully completed its first test observations. One of them exposed the heart of the galaxy NGC 1097 in mesmerising detail. Installed on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Cerro Paranal in northern Chile, this infrared instrument will be able to see further and in finer detail, leading the way in Solar System, exoplanet and galaxy observations. more

A few weeks ago, Professor Maarten Schmidt, an external scientific member of the MPE for many years and involved in numerous projects, passed away. The two former MPE directors, Joachim Trümper and Günter Hasinger, who worked with Schmidt for many years, remember. more

The Danish Society of Engineers, IDA, awards the Niels Bohr International Gold Medal to Prof. Ewine F. van Dishoeck (Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and Leiden University, Netherlands). The medal has been awarded since 1955 for ”outstanding work by an engineer or physicist for the peaceful utilization of atomic energy”. more

The German Astronomical Society (AG) has awarded MPE scientist Dr. Tommaso Grassi with the Astrophysical Software Award for the development of the astrochemistry package KROME. The award ceremony will take place at the University of Bremen during the annual AG meeting from 12th to 16th of September 2022. more

The IAU has awarded MPE junior scientist Riccardo Arcodia with a PhD prize for his thesis on “Accretion onto black holes across the mass scale”. Along with the other nine prizewinners, he will give a talk at the next IAU general assembly, taking place at the beginning of August in Busan, Republic of Korea. more

At the occasion of the 2022 SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation conference, the Lowell Observatory and the Observatoire de la Cote d’Azur awarded the 2020 Michelson Investigator Achievement Award to Dr. Frank Eisenhauer, on behalf of himself, the GRAVITY consortium and the ESO VLTI team for the groundbreaking results of VLTI-GRAVITY. more

Julia Zimmermann talks about the foundation of the company terraplasma GmbH more