Research Reports

With the help of detailed observations, astronomers have managed to get a first representative glimpse of the numerous young stars in the central regions of our home galaxy. The observations provide evidence for star formation in the Galactic Center having started off near the center and then worked its way outwards. This confirms a mode of star formation that had earlier been found in the centers of other, distant galaxies. The results also reveal that most stars in that region did not form in tightly-bound massive clusters, but in loose associations whose member stars have long since gone their separate ways. The results have been published in Nature Astronomy.
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Webb ushers in a new era of exoplanet science with the first unequivocal detection of carbon dioxide in a planetary atmosphere outside our solar system. more

Astronomers trace the trajectory of gas streams from a disk surrounding a massive young star to a collimated jet by observing water masers more

Astronomers simulate physical processes in the interstellar medium of galaxies at “Cosmic Noon” for future SKAO observations more

The European Space Agency's Gaia mission is publishing its third data release (DR3). The published catalogue of astronomical objects amounts to the most complete cosmic census to date, and is likely to have a decisive influence on astronomical research for years to come. Key information that is part of the survey, namely classification data that allows astronomers to readily search for objects such as stars, galaxies, or quasars, as well as physical information about stellar properties like temperature and chemical composition, were contributed by the Gaia group at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy.
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