06/17/2021 For the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, the ORIGINS PhD Days could take place on site – this year from May 30 to June 2 at Ringberg Castle, a conference venue of the Max Planck Society. During the three-day workshop, the 18 PhD students got to know each other and exchanged ideas about their research in stimulating discussions.

06/09/2021 The moons of planets that have no parent star can possess an atmosphere and retain liquid water. Astrophysicists at LMU have calculated that such systems could harbor sufficient water to make life possible – and sustain it.

05/31/2021 For their groundbreaking observations of solar neutrinos, with which the fusion reactions inside the sun could be experimentally proofed for the first time, the team of the Borexino collaboration receives the prestigious Giuseppe and Vanna Cocconi Prize. Every two years, the European Physical Society awards it to an outstanding discovery in astro-particle physics and cosmology of the past 15 years. TUM emeritus Prof. Franz von Feilitzsch, Prof. Lothar Oberauer and Prof. Stefan Schönert, all working at the Chair of Experimental Astroparticle Physics of the Technical…

04/19/2021 For the third 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 addressing one of the important milestones of the cluster and connecting various research disciplines will be preferred.

03/10/2021 For the first time, a resonance at ultra-high energies predicted by the eventual Nobel laureate Sheldon Lee Glashow in 1960 was observed. The scientists of the IceCube collaboration identified a particle shower detected in the IceCube Neutrino Observatory as resulting from an interaction of a cosmic electron anti-neutrino with an atomic electron as a long-sought Glashow resonance. The result was published in Nature.

03/09/2021 Physicists has shown that slight alterations in transfer-RNA molecules (tRNAs) allow them to self-assemble into a functional unit that can replicate information exponentially. tRNAs are key elements in the evolution of early life-forms.

03/02/2021 The European Astronomical Society (EAS) awards the 2021 Tycho Brahe Medal to ORIGINS Scientist Dr. Frank Eisenhauer (Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, MPE) for his leadership of the SINFONI and GRAVITY instruments on the ESO VLT, which revolutionized the study of exoplanets, supermassive black holes, and star forming galaxies in the early universe.

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…