Henrik Beuther awarded with 1.6 Mio Euro by ERC Research Grant

4. März 2015
Henrik Beuther, scientist in the Planet and Star Formation – Department of MPIA, has been awarded with 1.6 Mio EURO by an ERC Research Grant. The ERC project is build around two large observing programs at two of the most advanced interferometers, and it is designed to study the full cycle of cloud formation, star formation and finally feedback to the interstellar medium. The Grant will allow the implementation of a working group consisting of three postdocs and one PhD student during the next five years.

Star Formation is a hierarchical process from the build-up of large clouds of interstellar gas and dust to the assembly of stars and their surrounding planetary systems. The ERC project of Henrik Beuther aims at studying the multi-scale processes of this remarkable and complex conversion from diffuse gas to stars.
The fundamental data are provided by two PI-led large observing programs at two of the most advanced radio- and mm-interferometers, the Very Large Array (VLA) and the Plateau de Bure Interferometer (PdBI).

“This combined approach is designed to address outstanding key questions in the field of cloud and star formation”, says Henrik Beuther, the PI of the ERC proposal and who has a decade-long expertise and leadership in scientific research programs regarding star/cloud formation. “I am very happy and thankful for the ERC Grant since we now are also able to implement a strong core group of three postdocs and one PhD student to conduct the project and fully exploit the scientific results of these exciting surveys”.

The European Research Council provides different grants within the ERC Frontier Research Grants scheme. All grant applications must demonstrate the ground-breaking nature and ambition of the project, as well as the excellence of the investigator. Henrik Beuther got his PhD degree at the Max-Planck-Institute for Radioastronomy in Bonn. Afterwards, he worked as a Postdoc and Emmy-Noether Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge/USA (CfA) in the Submillimeter Array Group (SMA). Between 2005 and 2009, he was the Head of an Emmy-Noether Research Group at MPIA dedicated to study the earliest stages of massive star formation employing the techniques of (Sub)millimeter Interferometry. Since then, he is a MPIA staff member within the Planet and Star Formation Department lead by MPIA Director Thomas Henning.

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