11/14/2024 Make way for science! At 7 pm on October 17 at Bahnwärter Thiel, the four Munich Excellence Clusters e-conversion, MCQST, ORIGINS, and SyNergy hosted their first-ever Science Slam with great success. Over 300 guests followed the event's motto, "Expect the Unexpected," and flocked to the iconic location in the Schlachthofviertel. There, the young researchers slammed with raw eggs, balloons and mixers, pizzapasta (or was it pastapizza?), radioactive bananas, tennis balls, tangled headphones, water bottles and croissants, and above all with a lot of heart and mind. It…

11/14/2024 Radioactive nuclei with very long lifetimes can provide us with important data on the formation history of our sun, especially if their lifetimes are strongly dependent on the environment. Thallium ($^{205}$Tl) is one of the few nuclei that are stable as an atom, but have only a short lifetime without their electron shell, for example in a stellar plasma. An international collaboration including ORIGINS scientists has now succeeded in measuring the $\beta$ decay of fully ionized $^{205}$Tl in the bound state. The results confirm that a long-lived, huge molecular cloud was…

11/06/2024 This year, the European Research Council (ERC) is funding four ORIGINS scientists with prestigious Synergy Grants for their collaborative projects. The recipients are biophysicist Petra Schwille (MPIB), astrophysicist Kevin Heng (LMU), cosmologist Torsten Enßlin (MPA), and systems biophysicist Dieter Braun (LMU).

10/19/2024 On Saturday, 19 October, the ESO Supernova will participate in the nationwide Long Night of Astronomy and open its doors between 18:30 and 23:00. Together with the ORIGINS Excellence Cluster an exciting programme is planned with various free activities.

10/11/2024 The origin of life on Earth is still an unsolved mystery, but a common theory suggests that the replication of genetic material – the nucleic acids DNA and RNA – was a central and crucial process. Researchers from the ORIGINS Excellence Cluster at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) uncovered a plausible geological constellation that could have triggered the emergence of life on Earth.

09/24/2024 The researchers of the ALICE collaboration present the first exploration of the strong interaction within a system of three nucleons. This was achieved by measuring the relative velocities between pairs of protons and deuterons produced in proton-proton collisions at the ALICE detector at the LHC, CERN. This technique to study the strong interaction, developed by ORIGINS scientist Laura Fabbietti and her research group at TUM, has already been successfully employed on pairs of particles, demonstrating its reliability and preciseness. The new results pave the way for its…

09/15/2024 On a regular basis, "Exzellent erklärt – Spitzenforschung für alle" reports from one of the 57 clusters of excellence funded under the Excellence Strategy of the German federal and state governments. In the second ORIGINS episode "The Universe in the lab: How artificial intelligence (AI) helps in the search for elementary particles", podcaster Larissa Vassilian talks to Prof. Dr. Lukas Heinrich and Dr. Philipp Eller about the use of artificial intelligence in physics.

09/06/2024 Researchers from LMU, the ORIGINS Excellence Cluster, the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE), and the ORIGINS Data Science Lab (ODSL) have made an important breakthrough in the analysis of exoplanet atmospheres. Using physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), they have managed to model the complex light scattering in the atmospheres of exoplanets with greater precision than has previously been possible. This method opens up new opportunities for the analysis of exoplanet atmospheres, especially with regard to the influence of clouds, and could…

09/05/2024 The European Research Council awards ERC Starting Grants to ORIGINS scientists Prof. Philipp Reiss and Dr. Max Gronke. Philipp Reiss holds the professorship of Lunar and Planetary Exploration at the Technical University of Munich. His research is dedicated to the exploration of the moon, the planets and space, as well as the technologies required for this. Max Gronke leads the 'Multiphase Gas' research group at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. His research focuses on understanding the complex interactions of multiphase gas in various astrophysical contexts.

08/02/2024 The origins of life remain a major mystery. How were complex molecules able to form and remain intact for prolonged periods without disintegrating? A team at ORIGINS, a Munich-based Cluster of Excellence, has demonstrated a mechanism that could have enabled the first RNA molecules to stabilize in the primordial soup. When two RNA strands combine, their stability and lifespan increase significantly.