02/12/2026 During the past Antarctic summer season, a team of 51 scientists and technicians – including two members of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) – installed more than 600 new sensors at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole. The upgrade represents a major scientific and engineering achievement, realized through close collaboration with German and international partners.

02/05/2026 Cosmic rays are messengers from space that scientists use to study the Universe. ORIGINS scientist Francesca Capel and ORIGINS doctoral student Nadine Bourriche from the Max Planck Institute for Physics have investigated one of the most energetic cosmic rays ever observed: the Amaterasu particle, named after the Japanese sun goddess. Their work marks an important step toward solving the puzzle of its origin, providing a new analytical approach to tracing the possible sources of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.

02/04/2026 From day one, our former cluster coordinator Prof. Dr. Stephan Paul, as he says, “took the research reactor to his heart,” sat on the MLZ supervisory board, and helped develop the scientific instruments. Now, the professor of hadron and particle physics with neutrons at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has been awarded the MLZ Prize for Instrumentation and Scientific Use for his many years of commitment.

12/17/2025 The German Federal Ministry for Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) is funding the "SciFM" project, which brings together leading researchers in the field of AI for fundamental physics from across Germany. The two ORIGINS scientists, Lukas Heinrich (TUM School of Natural Sciences) and Daniel Grün (LMU Physics), are the main project leaders from the Munich region.

12/11/2025 Another long-standing mystery in particle physics has finally been solved. An international research team of the ALICE experiment at CERN’s particle accelerator, led by ORIGINS researchers from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), has for the first time directly observed how light atomic nuclei and their antiparticles – so-called deuterons and antideuterons – are formed in extremely high-energy particle collisions.

12/09/2025 The European Research Council has awarded ORIGINS scientists Prof. Karen Alim and Prof. Karoline Schäffner an ERC Consolidator Grant. Karen Alim holds a professorship in Biological Physics and Morphogenesis at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). Her research focuses on non-neuronal information processing. Karoline Schäffner is Professor of Experimental Dark Matter and Neutrinos at the TUM School of Natural Sciences and heads a research group on dark matter at the Max Planck Institute for Physics.

12/08/2025 The ORIGINS Excellence Cluster is once again honoring two outstanding doctoral dissertations this year. The doctoral prizes go to Christine Kriebisch from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and to Thomas Matreux from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU). The ORIGINS PhD Awards were presented at a ceremony during ORIGINS Science Week, held from December 1st to 5th, 2025, at Seeon Abbey.

10/09/2025 Today, we are celebrating the birthday of an ORIGINS scientist whose impact spans generations, continents - and the (local) universe itself. Rolf Kudritzki is a world leading expert in the field of extragalactic stellar spectroscopy and the founding director of the Munich Institute for Astro-, Particle and BioPhysics (MIAPbP), a centre for scientific exchange.

10/02/2025 Astronomers, among them ORIGINS researchers, have identified an enormous ‘growth spurt’ in a so-called rogue planet. The new observations, made with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), reveal that this free-floating planet is eating up gas and dust from its surroundings at a rate of six billion tonnes a second. This is the strongest growth rate ever recorded for a rogue planet, or a planet of any kind, providing valuable insights into how they form and grow.

09/13/2025 On Saturday, September 13, the ESO Supernova will participate in the nationwide Long Night of Astronomy and will be offering various special programs from 6:30 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. Researchers from the ORIGINS cluster will also be present, answering questions in the exhibition and, weather permitting, conducting live observations with the telescopes on the roof terrace.