08/24/2022 The German Astronomical Society announced that ORIGINS Scientist Hans-Thomas Janka from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA) will receive the Karl Schwarzschild Medal, the most prestigious prize in Germany in the field of astronomy and astrophysics. The medal honours his research on the core-collapse supernova mechanism, explosive nucleosynthesis, and supernova neutrino physics

08/01/2022 The astrophysicist Prof. Dr. Kevin Heng will lead the Chair of Theoretical Astrophysics of Extrasolar Planets at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich (LMU) on 01 August 2022 and will become ORIGINS PI. His focus is the theory of exoplanet atmospheres.

07/27/2022 Thanks to the first scientific image released this month by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of scientists led by the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA) has built an improved model for the mass distribution of the galaxy cluster SMACS J0723 .3−7327. As a gravitational lens, this galaxy cluster multiplies and magnifies images of background galaxies. A family of such multiple images belongs to a galaxy that the new model estimates to be 13 billion light-years away. If confirmed, it underscores the importance of accurate gravitational…

06/27/2022 From June 24 to 26, 2022, FORSCHA and the Munich Science Days offered visitors an adventurous journey through the fascinating worlds of research. ORIGINS was there and inspired young and young at heart science enthusiasts with findings from astrophysics, biophysics and particle physics.

06/22/2022 After 60 years of unsuccessful searches, an international research team has discovered a neutral nucleus for the first time - the tetra-neutron. The collaboration succeeded in creating an isolated four-neutron system with low relative kinetic energy in a volume equivalent to an atomic nucleus. The researchers overcame the experimental challenge by using a new method: a radioactive neutron-rich ⁸He beam and a fast high-energy reaction with a proton.

06/15/2022 Our Sun counts more than 400 stars and an ever-growing number of exoplanets among its immediate neighbours within ten parsecs (or 33 light-years). Now, two new Super-Earths are added to the list that are just at the edge of the solar neighbourhood and in the fourth closest stellar system. They were recently discovered by an international team of researchers, including Dr. Karan Molaverdikhani from ORIGINS PI Prof. Barbara Ercolano's research group. Life is unlikely on these two exoplanets, but they are among the best candidates for the observations by the James Webb Space…

06/03/2022 July 4, 2012 marks an unforgettable day in particle physics. On this date, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN announced the discovery of the Higgs boson. This year's 10th birthday of the Higgs particle is being celebrated in around the world. In Germany, the Committee for Elementary Particle Physics (KET) has called for a nationwide day of action - the Max Planck Institute for Physics (MPP) is also joining along with the Cluster of Excellence ORIGINS.

05/25/2022 Elisa Resconi, ORIGINS PI and spokesperson of the SFB1258, receives an ERC Advanced Grant to build a new observatory for cosmic neutrinos. Within the next few years, Resconi and an international research team will develop and deploy the first three measurement strands of P-ONE, the Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment. The prototype of the first measurement string is currently being developed with extensive support from ORIGINS.

05/17/2022 This year, Frank Eisenhauer, ORIGINS scientist from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, will be awarded the Gruber Cosmology Prize for his revolutionary development of instruments that have gathered irrefutable evidence for the existence of a black hole at the center of our galaxy. The award recognizes the "unprecedented and exquisite" precision of his instruments.

05/11/2022 The bubbling surface of massive giant stars causes their observable positions on the sky to wobble. An international team lead by astrophysicists at the ORIGINS Excellence Cluster has now performed detailed simulations of the gas motions in the atmospheric layers of these stars and compared these with high-quality data of the Perseus stellar cluster. They find that the surface structures could indeed account for a large part of the measurement uncertainty in the observations.