Black Holes

Astronomers discover the most distant radio-loud quasar currently known more

Nadine Neumayer was appointed Lise Meitner Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg as part of the Lise Meitner Excellence Program of the Max Planck Society (MPG). Most recently, she already headed a Max Planck Research Group in Hans-Walter Rix's ‘Galaxies and Cosmology’ Department at MPIA. Nadine Neumayer initiates and leads research projects that investigate how supermassive black holes are formed and what role they play in the evolution of galaxies. more

Einstein’s theory of general relativity and Newton’s theory of gravitation make slightly different predictions when it comes to objects orbiting a central mass. Now a consortium of researchers, led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) and including astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA), has for the first time detected the so-called Schwarzschild precession, a specific general-relativistic effect that changes the orbit of a body around a central mass, for a star orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The effect depends in part on the curvature of space around the central mass. more