Latest Press Releases

07/03/2023 The ESA space telescope Euclid, with significant contributions by ORIGINS scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching, was launched into space today, 1 July 2023 at 17:12 CEST on a Falcon 9 rocket by the US space company SpaceX. Once it arrives at its destination, the Lagrange Point 2 (L2) of Earth-Sun system, it will observe over a third of the entire sky for at least six years, mapping the spatial distribution of billions of galaxies and measuring their properties. Analysing this data, the six German institutes in the…

06/29/2023 For the first time, the scientists of the international IceCube Collaboration have succeeded in detecting neutrinos from the Milky Way. The analysis of ten years of observation data using machine learning methods led to the success for which ORIGINS scientist Elisa Resconi's group at the Technical University of Munich provided important preliminary work. In the next step, the researchers strive to understand from which celestial objects the observed high-energy neutrinos come.

06/29/2023 „Universe on Tour“ stoppt vom 05. bis 09. Juli 2023 in München. Im Rahmen der bundesweiten Roadshow im Wissenschaftsjahr 2023 – Unser Universum präsentieren das Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung und Münchner Forschungsinstitute in einem 75 Quadratmeter großen mobilen Planetarium aktuelle Themen im Bereich Astronomie und Astrophysik. Mit dabei: der Exzellenzcluster ORIGINS, die Universitäts-Sternwarte München (LMU), die Max-Planck-Institute für Physik, für extraterrestrische Physik und für Astrophysik, die Europäische Südsternwarte ESO und die Volkssternwarte…

03/15/2023 Liquid water is one of the most important ingredients for the emergence of life as we know it on Earth. Researchers of the ORIGINS Cluster from the fields of astrophysics, astrochemistry and biochemistry have now determined in a novel, interdisciplinary collaboration the necessary properties that allow moons around free-floating planets to retain liquid water for a sufficiently long time and thus enable life.

12/12/2022 How are galaxies born, and what holds them together? Astronomers assume that dark matter plays an essential role. However, as yet it has not been possible to prove directly that dark matter exists. A research team including Technical University of Munich (TUM) scientists has now measured for the first time the survival rate of antihelium nuclei from the depths of the galaxy – a necessary prerequisite for the indirect search for Dark Matter.

11/03/2022 For over ten years the IceCube Observatory in the Antarctic has been monitoring the light traces of extragalactic neutrinos. While evaluating the observatory's data, an international research team led by the Technical University of Munich (TUM) discovered a high-energy neutrino radiation source in the active galaxy NGC 1068, also known as Messier 77.

08/24/2022 The German Astronomical Society announced that ORIGINS Scientist Hans-Thomas Janka from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA) will receive the Karl Schwarzschild Medal, the most prestigious prize in Germany in the field of astronomy and astrophysics. The medal honours his research on the core-collapse supernova mechanism, explosive nucleosynthesis, and supernova neutrino physics

06/22/2022 After 60 years of unsuccessful searches, an international research team has discovered a neutral nucleus for the first time - the tetra-neutron. The collaboration succeeded in creating an isolated four-neutron system with low relative kinetic energy in a volume equivalent to an atomic nucleus. The researchers overcame the experimental challenge by using a new method: a radioactive neutron-rich ⁸He beam and a fast high-energy reaction with a proton.

06/15/2022 Our Sun counts more than 400 stars and an ever-growing number of exoplanets among its immediate neighbours within ten parsecs (or 33 light-years). Now, two new Super-Earths are added to the list that are just at the edge of the solar neighbourhood and in the fourth closest stellar system. They were recently discovered by an international team of researchers, including Dr. Karan Molaverdikhani from ORIGINS PI Prof. Barbara Ercolano's research group. Life is unlikely on these two exoplanets, but they are among the best candidates for the observations by the James Webb Space…

05/17/2022 This year, Frank Eisenhauer, ORIGINS scientist from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, will be awarded the Gruber Cosmology Prize for his revolutionary development of instruments that have gathered irrefutable evidence for the existence of a black hole at the center of our galaxy. The award recognizes the "unprecedented and exquisite" precision of his instruments.