Maximilian Häberle Receives the PhD Award of the German Astronomical Society (AG)

Maximilian Häberle will be awarded the Doctoral Prize at the annual conference of the German Astronomical Society (AG) in September 2026. This is the third major award he has received for his PhD thesis in a very short period of time.

The German Astronomical Society awards the Doctoral Prize to a young astronomer for the best PhD thesis of the past calendar year. In addition to a certificate, the prize consists of a cash award of 1,000 euros. The prize will be presented at the Society’s annual conference in September.

In its press release, the German Astronomical Society honors Maximilian Häberle “in recognition of his groundbreaking contributions to the study of black holes and stellar systems.”

The statement continues:
“As part of his doctoral research, he created an unprecedented astrometric catalog for more than 1.4 million stars in Omega Centauri, the most massive stellar cluster in the Milky Way. He identified a small population of fast-moving stars in the cluster’s core and demonstrated that their motions can only be explained by the presence of an intermediate-mass black hole with a mass exceeding 8,000 solar masses. This discovery represents the first firm detection of an intermediate-mass black hole and resolves a long-standing question in astrophysics regarding the existence of black holes that bridge the gap between stellar-mass and supermassive black holes.”

Until recently, Maximilian Häberle worked at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in the Lise Meitner “Galactic Nuclei” group led by Nadine Neumayer and completed his PhD — for which he has now been honored with the AG Prize — at the University of Heidelberg.

Just recently, he received the Otto Hahn Medal from the Max Planck Society for his work, as well as the PhD Prize from the International Astronomical Union (IAU).

Details about his work and the other awards, including videos and images, can be found on the following pages:

MPIA Press Release Astronomers find the nearest massive black hole, a missing link in massive black hole formation
MPIA News Otto Hahn Medal for Maximilian Häberle
MPIA News IAU PhD Award for Maximilian Häberle

You can also find here the Press Release of the German Astronomical Society

KJ/MH/NN