Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics

Frank-Walter Steinmeier and a delegation visit some of the largest astronomical observatories threatened by a planned industrial plant on the Chilean coast

Data from the former ROSAT X-ray satellite have revealed a network of 68 galaxy clusters in the nearby universe, stretching over 1.4 billion light-years. 

New scientific data from the Euclid Space Telescope reveals the mystery of the faint glow in the Perseus galaxy cluster

Results from the first X-ray sky survey resolve the previous inconsistency between competing measurements of the structure of the Universe
 

First eROSITA sky-survey data release makes public the largest ever catalogue of high-energy cosmic sources

Interstellar clouds of gas and dust – these are the birthplaces of stars and planets. To understand what exactly happens inside these clouds, a group led by Silvia Spezzano at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching near Munich is observing different molecules in the clouds and simulating the interstellar chemistry in a laboratory. Their work provides insights into how conditions conducive to the development of life arise within solar systems.

Sitting deep in the heart of the Milky Way, it is 27,000 light years from Earth and resembles a donut: this is how the black hole at the center of our galaxy looks in the image obtained by researchers using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).

Stars cluster in galaxies of dramatically different shapes and sizes: elliptical galaxies, spheroidal galaxies, lenticular galaxies, spiral galaxies, and occasionally even irregular galaxies. Nadine Neumayer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg and Ralf Bender at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching investigate the reasons for this diversity. They have already identified one crucial factor: dark matter.

The Director at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching was awarded the Nobel Prize for his research on black holes, in particular for the detection of the supermassive black hole that resides at the heart of our Milky Way. Reinhard Genzel shares the prize with Andrea Ghez and Roger Penrose.

Dark matter and dark energy account for 95% of the matter-energy content of the universe, but they are still enigmatic. The ESA mission Euclid is the first space mission to investigate the space-time evolution of these two major components of the universe. To this end, the parameters of 1.5 billion galaxies in up to 10 billion light years distance will be measured at optical and near-infrared wavelengths. The large-scale distribution of galaxies and their gravitational lensing effect on background galaxies will provide direct clues to the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

Supernova remnants are what is left after a star explodes: a good part of their emission happens in radio and in X-rays. Here we present the analysis of Vela Jr, carried out with the X-ray all-sky survey dataset provided by the MPE-led mission eROSITA. This dataset allows to image the entire remnant for the first time after the ROSAT mission launched in 1990. We find the spectrum of Vela Jr is featureless and we provide a new measurement for the geometric center. We investigate also the NW rim of the remnant, where particle acceleration is supposed to take place, a process still poorly known.

The discovery of the massive black hole in the center of the Milky Way was honored in 2020 with the Nobel prize. Yet, our research nowadays goes way beyond the discovery. We don’t ask anymore whether the black hole exists, rather we use it to conduct physics experiments in the sky. It is perfect laboratory, located at a mere 26.000 light years in our cosmic backyard. This allows for breath-taking precision measurements that not only test Einstein’s theory of general relativity, but that even reveal that beyond the black hole, not much more matter can hide in the Milky Way center.

For the first time, we have observed a conveyor belt from the outskirts of a star-forming dense cloud directly depositing material near a pair of young forming stars. The gas motions in the conveyor belt, dubbed a 'streamer', mainly obey the gravitational pull from the innermost part of the core. The streamer delivers a large amount of gas with chemicals recently produced in the larger mother cloud directly to the young protostars. These results are striking evidence that the large-scale environment around forming stars has an important influence on small-scale disk formation and evolution.

Which galaxies harbour the most massive black holes? Even though galaxies tend to get more luminous towards their centres, the most massive galaxies exhibit a deficit of stars in their centres. The giant galaxy Holm 15A exhibits a particularly large deficit, and in this galaxy, we found a 40-billion-solar-mass black hole – the most massive known today. The faint centres of giant galaxies thus are an important indicator for the mass of their black hole – potentially even at distances, where direct measurements are not possible today.