News

MPE researchers are excited and are eagerly awaiting the first results. more

Euclid, ESA’s newest space telescope with strong German participation, has delivered its first test images a few weeks after the rocket launch. more

The ESA space telescope Euclid, with significant contributions by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching, was launched into space today, 1 July 2023 at 17:12 CEST on a Falcon 9 rocket by the US space company SpaceX. Once it arrives at its destination, the Lagrange Point 2 (L2) of Earth-Sun system, it will observe over a third of the entire sky for at least six years, mapping the spatial distribution of billions of galaxies and measuring their properties. Analysing this data, the six German institutes in the international Euclid consortium hope understand better, how Dark Matter and Dark Energy influence the structure of the universe. more

Shortly before being shipped to the rocket launch, the Euclid project team took a last look at the impressive satellite that will soon map the distribution of galaxies in space more precisely than ever before. more

With a sophisticated combination of human and artificial intelligence, astronomers uncovered 1701 new asteroid trails in archival data of the Hubble Space Telescope spanning the past 20 years. While about one third could be identified and attributed to known objects, more than 1000 trails probably correspond to previously unknown asteroids. These unidentified asteroids are faint and likely smaller than asteroids detected in ground-based surveys. They could give the astronomers valuable clues about conditions in the early solar system, when the planets were formed. more

Using a combination of observed stars and a realistic model of the Milky Way, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics have found a new structure in our home galaxy. Just outside the Galactic bar, they found an inner ring of metal rich stars, which are younger than the stars in the bar. The ages of the ring stars can be used to estimate that the bar must have formed at least 7 billion years ago.  The existence of this ring makes it likely that star formation from inflowing gas played an important role at these early epochs. more

In September, the payload module for the Euclid space telescope passed its final tests and is now ready for integration with the service module. Together with the Euclid telescope, the two instruments VIS and NISP, whose optics were developed and constructed at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, delivered sharp images after a simulated rocket launch. The Euclid mission is scheduled to launch into space in 2022 to study the “dark universe”. 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

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) released today a comprehensive analysis of the largest three-dimensional map of the Universe ever created, filling in the most significant gaps in our possible exploration of its history. The collaboration, including researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, was able to obtain the most accurate measurements of the expansion history of our Universe over the widest-ever range of cosmic time. more

ESA’s Euclid mission to study more than a billion galaxies is a step closer to launch as its two instruments are now built and fully tested, including the complex near Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP) instrument delivered by an international consortium coordinated by France, with partners from Italy, Germany, Spain, Denmark, Norway and the United States. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics are responsible for the overall optical design of the near-infrared instrument NISP NI-OA. more