Otto Hahn Medal for Maximilian Häberle
Maximilian Häberle has been awarded the Otto Hahn Medal by the Max Planck Society (MPG). With this honor, the MPG recognizes his doctoral thesis, which confirms the existence of a medium-mass black hole in the Omega Centauri star cluster.
Since 1978, the Max Planck Society (MPG) has annually honored some of its best young scientists with the Otto Hahn Medal. The prestigious award is named after the famous German chemist and Nobel laureate Otto Hahn (1879–1968), who also served as president of the MPG from 1948 to 1960. The MPG views the award primarily as a source of motivation and support for young, exceptionally talented scientists, with the aim of advancing their careers in active research.
One of the 2026 award recipients from the MPG’s Chemical-Physical-Technical Section (CPTS) is Maximilian Häberle. Until recently, he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in the Lise Meitner “Galactic Nuclei” group led by Nadine Neumayer and completed his PhD —now honored with this award —at the University of Heidelberg.
In his work, Maximilian Häberle analyzed high-resolution images of the central region of Omega Centauri taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Omega Centauri is not only considered the most massive globular cluster in our Milky Way—it is also often regarded by researchers as the remnant of the central region of a dwarf galaxy that is in gravitational interaction with our home galaxy. In such objects, hundreds of thousands or millions of stars are clustered together in a relatively concentrated manner. Since such a star cluster is also well-suited as a general calibration source for measurements, Omega Centauri was regularly observed over a period of several years.
Thanks to this image data spanning more than two decades, Maximilian Häberle was able to measure the movements of the stars all the way to the very center through a detailed analysis and combination of the individual images using the large database.
“Since such motions result from gravitational forces, the masses involved in this region of Omega Centauri can be determined. The measurements point to a central black hole of intermediate mass, exceeding 8,200 solar masses,” says Maximilian Häberle, who is now conducting research at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Garching.
The result is spectacular, as it represents the long-sought missing link between “small” stellar black holes and the supermassive black holes at the centers of large galaxies. This marks the first discovery of a medium-mass black hole. Its existence was anticipated, as a correlation has been observed in more massive galaxies between the masses of their central regions (the so-called bulge) and the masses of the black holes found in these centers. Further details on the work are summarized in this press release.
The award ceremony took place at the MPG’s annual meeting in Frankfurt on June 17, 2026.
KJ/MH/NN