09/09/2020 The “IceCube” neutrino observatory deep in the ice of the South Pole has already brought spectacular new insights into cosmic incidents of extremely high energies. In order to investigate the cosmic origins of elementary particles with even higher energies, Prof. Elisa Resconi from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has now started an international initiative to build a neutrino telescope several cubic kilometers in size in the northeastern Pacific.

07/30/2020 Astrophysicist Sherry H. Suyu will receive the 2021 Lancelot M. Berkeley–New York Community Trust Prize for Meritorious Work in Astronomy. Bestowed annually since 2011 by the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and supported by a grant from the New York Community Trust, the Berkeley prize includes a monetary award and an invitation to give the closing plenary lecture at the AAS winter meeting, the “Super Bowl of Astronomy.” The 237th AAS meeting will be held virtually from 11 to 15 January 2021.

06/26/2020 Tailwind for the search for rare particle decays in the Belle II experiment: The SuperKEKB accelerator ring has now achieved the highest luminosity ever measured. The electron-positron accelerator beats not only its predecessor KEKB but also the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. This has just been announced by the Japanese research center KEK, the operator of the accelerator.

06/19/2020 Over the course of 182 days, the eROSITA X-ray telescope onboard SRG has completed its first full sweep of the sky. This new map of the hot, energetic universe contains more than one million objects, roughly doubling the number of known X-ray sources discovered over the 60-year history of X-ray astronomy. Most of the new sources are active galactic nuclei at cosmological distances, marking the growth of gigantic black holes over cosmic time. Clusters of galaxies in the new map will be used to track the growth of cosmic structures and constrain cosmological parameters.…

06/18/2020 Der LMU-Astrophysiker, ZDF-Wissenschaftsjournalist und ORIGINS PI Professor Harald Lesch ist mit dem Deutschen Fernsehpreis ausgezeichnet worden. Für die Wissenschaftsreihe „Leschs Kosmos“ gewann er stellvertretend für das Team gemeinsam mit Redakteurin Christiane Götz-Sobel die Kategorie „Bestes Infotainment“.

06/17/2020 Dr. Daniel Grošelj from Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) at Garching was today awarded the Otto Hahn Medal. With this award, the Max Planck Society honors young scientists every year for outstanding achievements, mostly in connection with their doctoral thesis. At the end of 2019 Daniel Grošelj already received the ORIGINS PhD Award for his outstanding doctoral thesis in the field of astrophysical plasma physics.

05/27/2020 Since anti-matter could be interpreted as a dark matter annihilation signal, satellite and balloon experiments are currently hunting for dark matter particles near Earth. But anti-matter could also be produced by interactions of high-energy cosmic rays with the interstellar medium. To better understand the production mechanism and the annihilation of anti-matter, the ALICE collaboration has conducted a comprehensive study of the yield of anti-matter resulting from proton-proton collisions and evaluated for the first time the cross section of anti-deuteron at low energies.

05/08/2020 Great honour for ORIGINS scientist Volker Springel: the director at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy is being awarded the 2020 Gruber Cosmology Prize for his defining contributions to cosmological simulations. Springel shares the $500,000 prize with Lars Hernquist of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The researchers have developed methods to test existing theories about the formation of structures at every scale from stars to galaxies to the universe itself. Springel and Hernquist developed numerical algorithms and community codes which are used by many…

04/22/2020 For the summer semester 2020, the interdisciplinary lecture "Emergence of Life in the Universe" started for the first time, giving master students detailed insights into some of the research topics of the ORIGINS cluster. The project was initiated by ORIGINS scientists from the fields of astrophysics, organic chemistry and non-equilibrium physics under the coordination of Prof. Dieter Braun.

04/09/2020 For the second time, the Exellence Cluster ORIGINS awards two outstanding dissertations in the field of astro-, nuclear and particle physics as well as biophysics. The "ORIGINS PhD Awards 2020" will be given to PhD theses in the categories "experiment/observations" and "theory", respectively, and endowed with 2,000 Euros each.