01/23/2021

A new theory for the origin of the Solar System explains the meteorite record by forming planets in two distinct steps. The inner terrestrial protoplanets accreted early and were internally heated by strong radioactive decay. This degassed their volatiles and split the inner, dry from the outer, wet planetary population.

An international team of researchers from the University of Oxford, LMU Munich, ETH Zurich, BGI Bayreuth, and the University of Zurich discovered that a two-step formation process of the early Solar System can explain the chronology and split in volatile…

01/14/2021

The international collaboration, including Fermilab, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, NOIRLab and others, releases a massive, public collection of astronomical data and calibrated images from six years of surveys. This data release is one of the largest astronomical catalogs issued to date.

The Dark Energy Survey, a global collaboration including the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab, has released DR2, the second data release in…

12/17/2020

The research board of CERN, the world’s largest research organisation for fundamental science, has approved the scientific program and the erection of the COMPASS++/AMBER experiment at the CERN SPS. The approval comprises phase I of the research proposal which addresses three major research topics: (i) the charge radius of the proton using high-energy muons, (ii) the reaction rates for antiprotons by high-energy protons, which is relevant for antimatter investigations in cosmic rays, and (iii) the dissection of the dynamics of the constituents of the pion, a composite…

12/17/2020 More than half of the matter in our Universe has so far eluded our view. Astrophysicists have predicted however where it might be: in so-called filaments, unimaginably long structures made of hot gas that surround and connect galaxies and galaxy clusters. These filaments of hot gas in the computer simulations by Dr. Veronica Biffi and PD Dr. Klaus Dolag at the ORIGINS Cluster of Excellence are strikingly similar in their structure to the 50 million light years long filament which has now been observed for the first time by a team led by the University of Bonn using the…

12/11/2020 Great honor for ORIGINS scientist Volker Springel: the director at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics is one of ten awardees of the 2021 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize. The Leibniz Prize is the most important research award in Germany and is provided with maximum € 2.5 million per award. Volker Springel is being honored for his work in the field of numerical astrophysics.

12/09/2020 The positively charged protons in atomic nuclei should actually repel each other, and yet even heavy nuclei with many protons and neutrons stick together. The so-called strong interaction is responsible for this. ORIGINS member Prof. Laura Fabbietti and her research group at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have now developed a method to precisely measure the strong interaction utilizing particle collisions in the ALICE experiment at CERN in Geneva.

12/09/2020 The first all-sky survey performed by the eROSITA X-ray telescope on-board the Spektrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) observatory has revealed a large hourglass-shaped structure in the Milky Way. These “eROSITA bubbles” show a striking similarity to the Fermi bubbles, detected a decade ago at even higher energies. The most likely explanation for these features is a massive energy injection from the Galactic centre in the past, leading to shocks in the hot gas envelope of our galaxy.

10/06/2020 Reinhard Genzel, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, receives the Nobel Prize for Physics 2020 together with Roger Penrose and Andrea Ghez. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awards the scientists for their research on black holes.

09/25/2020 At the General Meeting of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on 9 September 2020, Linda Tacconi from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics was elected foreign member of the class for astronomy and space science. This honour recognises her exceptional research in millimetre astronomy and her efforts to promote European astronomy.

09/22/2020

ORIGINS scientist Til Birnstiel is receiving the 2020 Astrophysical Software Award of the German Astronomical Society for the software he developed for modelling the temporal and spatial evolution of dust in protoplanetary disks. Young stars and the disks around them are built up from interstellar matter which initially contains only very small, at most micrometer-sized, dust particles. Til Birnstiel has written codes describing the mechanisms which lead to the growth of grains over several orders of magnitude in mass and to study how they are distributed and transported in…