04/05/2022 For the fourth time, the Excellence Cluster ORIGINS awards two outstanding dissertations in the field of astro-, nuclear and particle physics as well as biophysics. Interdisciplinary thesis topics adressing one of the important milestones of the cluster and connecting various research disciplines will be preferred. The application deadline is 15 July 2022.

03/17/2022 Droplets of dew water on the primordial Earth could have been the first compartments to host the replication of short DNA molecules and their evolution.

02/28/2022 Vera Rubin Fellow at the ORIGINS Excellence Cluster Dr Verónica Errasti Díez organized and led two interactive events in Spain to mark International Women and Girls in Science Day 2022. The events introduced more than 300 students to the training and daily life of researchers in STEM fields.

02/22/2022 On March 1, 2022, Dr. Lukas Heinrich will take up the ORIGINS-supported professorship for Data Science in Physics at the TU Munich. His research focusses on the development of new AI and statistical methods for the search for physics beyond the Standard Model at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Professor Heinrich will also take over the coordination of the ORIGINS Data Science Laboratory (ODSL), continuing and expanding on its very successful beginnings under the leadership of Professor Allen Caldwell (MPP).

02/14/2022 The international KArlsruhe TRItium Neutrino Experiment (KATRIN), located at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), has broken an important "barrier" in neutrino physics which is relevant for both particle physics and cosmology. Based on data published in the prestigious journal Nature Physics, a new upper limit of 0.8 electronvolt (eV) for the mass of the neutrino has been obtained. This first push into the sub-eV mass scale of neutrinos by a model-independent laboratory method allows KATRIN to constrain the mass of these "lightweights of the universe" with unprecedented…

02/11/2022 This is how the very first film by the excellent women at the ORIGINS Cluster begins. And what exactly is it about? We have put together a video of the ORIGINS women to mark the International Day of Women and Girls in Science on February 11. The campaign aims to motivate girls and young women to get involved in science, since there are not that many women (yet) in mathematics, science, engineering and technology.

01/13/2022 What do we humans have in common with stars? Humans are born, live and die one day – so do stars. But with stars, everything happens over long cosmological time scales and with much more glamour and drama. An international research team, with the participation of the ORIGINS Excellence Cluster, has now reconstructed the history of the interstellar neighbourhood of our Sun, thereby showing how precisely star formation and stellar death are connected. The Sun is at the centre of a constantly growing, dust-free bubble whose dense rim is the birthplace of new stars.

01/12/2022 Joanna Drążkowska has received a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for her research on "Planetoids". Joanna works as a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Til Birnstiel, one of the principal investigators of ORIGINS, at the LMU University Observatory. Her research helps improve our fundamental understanding of planet formation.

01/11/2022 The General Assembly of the Académie des sciences, the Paris Academy of Sciences, has elected Frank Eisenhauer, ORIGINS scientist in the infrared group at MPE, as a foreign member. The official admission is to take place on 14 June 2022 in a formal ceremony in Paris.

01/03/2022 In April 2017 the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) observed the super-massive black hole M87* and provided a first image of its shadow that went around the world. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics have now reconstructed a video of the immediate surroundings of a black hole from the same underlying data. This not only confirms previous findings, it also hints at new structures and dynamics in the gas disk around the black hole.