John Kormendy appointed External Scientific Member of MPE

John Kormendy has made many significant discoveries, including the relation between surface brightness and radius of elliptical galaxies named after him (the 'Kormendy-relation'), the detection of the first extragalactic supermassive black holes in nearby galaxies, the correlation between black hole mass and bulge mass, and the recognition of slow, internal evolution as a key element in the shaping of present-day galaxies.

For almost twenty years, John Kormendy has closely collaborated with Ralf Bender's group at MPE and the University Observatory of the LMU to study nearby galaxies and the black holes at their cores. He is not only a regular summer visitor at the MPE but has also spent several sabbaticals in Munich. The MPE is looking forward to strengthen ties with John Kormendy and the Astronomy Department of the University of Texas even further and anticipates many more years of exciting research together.

John Kormendy says, "I am very grateful for this high honor from the Max Planck Society. My collaboration with MPE scientists is the most enjoyable and productive of my career.  The MPE and the LMU already collaborate broadly with the University of Texas at Austin through the Hobby-Eberly Telescope project and the HET Dark Energy Experiment.  I especially welcome this further strengthening of the ties between our institutions."

Other External Scientific Members of MPE are Ewine van Dishoeck, Vladimir Fortov, Roald Sagdeev, Maarten Schmidt, Yasuo Tanaka, and Charles Townes.