03/09/2026 Liquid water is considered essential for life. Surprisingly, however, stable conditions that are conducive to life could exist far from any sun. A research team from the Excellence Cluster ORIGINS at LMU and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) has shown that moons around free-floating planets can keep their water oceans liquid for up to 4.3 billion years by virtue of dense hydrogen atmospheres and tidal heating – that is to say, for almost as long as the Earth has existed and sufficient time for complex life to develop.

02/19/2026 That the Universe is expanding has been known for almost a hundred years now, but how fast? The exact rate of that expansion remains hotly debated, even challenging the standard model of cosmology. A research team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), the Ludwig Maximilians University (LMU) and the Max Planck Institutes for Astrophysics (MPA) and for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) has now imaged and modelled an exceptionally rare supernova nicknamed SN Winny that could provide a new, independent way to measure how fast the Universe is expanding. The project was…

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.