There are too few exoplanets that are twice the size of the Earth. Remo Burn from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy has discovered that this is because many planets do not stay where they were formed. Rocky planets that migrate inwards lose their atmosphere and shrink as a result, whereas icy planets would form a denser atmosphere in the first…
James Webb Space Telescope: What can we learn about the atmospheres of exoplanets with the largest space telescope? How is the JWST revolutionising our knowledge of exoplanets? Eva-Maria Ahrer reports on research into the atmospheres of exoplanets and presents new results.
How can the performance of an earthbound telescope be improved? Silvia Scheithauer reports on the CIAO instrument, the adaptive optics for the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile.
Euclid is a new ESA space telescope with the participation of a scientific consortium from fourteen European countries, the USA, Canada and Japan. Euclid was launched on 1 July 2023. Over the next 6 years, Euclid will record images and spectra of a third of the entire sky. The goal: to get to the bottom of the nature of dark matter and dark energy…
Good news for Earth-like planets and for life in the Universe: planets like our Earth, including those with water, could form even in the most inhospitable star-forming environments known, flooded by energetic UV light from massive stars. María Claudia Ramírez-Tannus from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy tells us how the JWST helped her…
Astronomical (imaging) data are generally heavily post-processed, and/or analysed in a complex way. Especially high-contrast observations require specific post-processing methods to remove image residuals that remain after all the sophisticated optical suppression methods. One such method, angular differential imaging, is explained in this video…
The Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg, Germany, employs people from around 60 countries from all over the world. On the occasion of the Open Day on 14 October 2023, we have produced a video in which some of them introduce themselves. They talk about how they came to MPIA and how they experience their working…
As part of her doctoral thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Sophia Stuber is researching star formation in nearby galaxies. Shortly before Christmas, her latest article was published, in which she and her colleagues mapped the whirlpool galaxy Messier 51 in the light of the molecules hydrogen cyanide (HCN) and diazenyl…
Cosmic dust is enormously important. Although often only a few nanometres in size, it can have a lasting influence on global cosmic processes, such as star formation, by absorbing and scattering starlight and subsequently emitting radiation. In molecular clouds, the chemical factories of the cosmos, it provides the surface for the formation of…
Animation illustrating the distribution of diazenylium and hydrogen cyanide within the Whirlpool Galaxy. Starting from an overview of the galaxy captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, the animation zooms in on the central region. Subsequently, overlays of the signatures of both molecules are presented. While their intensity uniformly increases and…
William Herschel (Wilhelm Herschel) is considered the discoverer of Uranus. In his lecture, Markus Nielbock introduces William Herschel, emphasising his role as a musician and astronomer. He will explain how Herschel came to England, how he started his career as a musician and how he finally made important discoveries as an astronomer.