Hubert Klahr, head of the Theoretical Astrophysics working group in the Planet and Star Formation (PSF) department at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, has been awarded one of the European Research Council's highly endowed and highly coveted funding prizes.
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.
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…
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.
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…
