Publications

Massive stellar embryos undergo episodic growth

July 13, 2020

The supply of massive stellar embryos with food from their surrounding disk of gas and dust has long been a mystery. An international research team, in which the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy is participating, has now discovered a spiral structure in such a disk, in the centre of which a growing star of about 12 solar masses has experienced a dramatic increase in brightness.

The cosmic commute towards star and planet formation

July 06, 2020

Interconnected gas flows reveal how star-forming gas is assembled in galaxies

From dust to, possibly, life: New experiments show complex astrochemistry on thin ice covering dust grains

June 05, 2020

Astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) and the University of Jena have obtained a clearer view of nature's tiny deep-space laboratories: tiny dust grains covered with ice. Instead of regular shapes covered thickly in ice, such grains appear to be fluffy networks of dust, with thin ice layers. In particular, that means the…

Gay-Lussac-Humboldt-Prize for Thomas Henning

May 07, 2020

The Director of the Planet and Star Formation Department at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg, Prof. Dr. Thomas Henning, has received the Gay Lussac Humboldt Prize of the French Academy of Sciences.

Precise tracking of star shows how the Milky Way’s central black hole curves space in its neighborhood

April 16, 2020

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…

Artist's impression of the whirlpool around a gigantic black hole

November 27, 2018

Detailed observations of the quasar 3C 273 with the GRAVITY instrument have revealled the structure of rapidly moving gas around the central super-massive black hole. Studying these black holes and determining their masses is an essential ingredient to understanding galaxy evolution in general.

SPHERE - On the Hunt for Exoplanets

June 05, 2015

Video with Thomas Henning and Markus Feldt produced by Klaus Jäger about the remarkable instrument SPHERE (Spectro - Polarimetric High- contrast Exo -planet REsearch) at the ESO Very Large Telescope in Chile.
(Movie in German, an English version will follow) Capturing direct images of exoplanets is one of the biggest challenges in observational…

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Origins

Planet formation takes place in the accretion disks around young stars. These disks display a large variety of spatial structures, which are thought to be caused by gas-dust dynamics, chemical processes, and the interaction between planets and the disk.

Publications

Massive stellar embryos undergo episodic growth

The cosmic commute towards star and planet formation

From dust to, possibly, life: New experiments show complex astrochemistry on thin ice covering dust grains

Gay-Lussac-Humboldt-Prize for Thomas Henning

Precise tracking of star shows how the Milky Way’s central black hole curves space in its neighborhood

Artist's impression of the whirlpool around a gigantic black hole

SPHERE - On the Hunt for Exoplanets

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Thomas K. Henning

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