Videos for the general public

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… more

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… more

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. more

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… more

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… more

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… more

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… more

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… more