Latest Press Releases

06/28/2021 What steers galaxies, or whole ensembles of galaxies - so-called galaxy clusters? Aren’t they surrounded by vast empty space? Could the recently discovered long hot interconnecting gas filaments play a role? Although cosmological models and simulations predicted these structures and the role they may play, the observational confirmation of their existence, using the x-ray space telescope eROSITA, is quite recent. Further snapshots of simulations compared to the observations unveil a galaxy group speeding along such a long gas filament, on a collision course with other…

06/28/2021 As announced during the 2021 meeting of the European Astronomical Society, the German eROSITA collaboration will release the first set of data taken with the eROSITA X-ray telescope onboard the SRG observatory. For the first time, astronomers throughout the world will have the chance to download and analyse data from this new powerful telescope. The Early Data Release will be accompanied by the publication of 35 eROSITA science papers by the German eROSITA Consortium on the arXiv preprint server, with these and more to be published in a forthcoming special issue of the…

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…

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.

01/14/2021

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 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…

12/09/2020 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.

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.

09/22/2020

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…