news 2023

International research team models the different signatures of a kilonova explosion simultaneously for the first time Neutron stars are the end products of massive stars and gather together a large part of the original stellar mass in a super-dense star with a diameter of only around ten kilometres.

Researchers have charted vast areas of the dense, cold gas of star nurseries in a neighboring galaxy for the first time. An international research team led by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) and involving the University of Bonn has mapped the cold, dense gas of future star nurseries in one of our neighboring galaxies with an unprecedented degree of detail.

Discovery of giant exomoons around the planets Kepler-1625b and Kepler-1708b called into question Just as it can be assumed that the stars in our Milky Way are orbited by planets, moons around these exoplanets should not be uncommon. This makes it all the more difficult to detect them. So far, only two of the more than 5300 known exoplanets have been found to have moons.

Planets like our Earth could form even in the harshest known star-forming environments, drenched by hard UV light from massive stars. That is a main result of analyses of new observations of such an environment with the James Webb Space Telescope. The observations are the first of their kind - before James Webb, this kind of detailed observation had not been possible.

Study by the Universities of Bonn and St. Andrews proposes a solution to one of the great mysteries of cosmology The universe is expanding. How fast it does so is described by the so-called Hubble-Lemaitre constant. But there is a dispute about how big this constant actually is: Different measurement methods provide contradictory values.

Researchers led by Göttingen University determine factors for chemical development in crater lakes on Earth In southern Germany just north of the Danube, there lies a large circular depression between the hilly surroundings: the Nördlinger Ries. Almost 15 million years ago, an asteroid struck this spot.

Euclid, the new space telescope launched by the ESA with the involvement of German researchers, has published its first color photographs from outer space. Never before has a telescope been able to produce such sharp astronomical images of such a wide expanse of sky while looking so deep into the distant universe.

Researchers improve measurement of the earth's rotation Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have succeeded in measuring the earth's rotation more exactly than ever before. The ring laser at the Geodetic Observatory Wettzell can now be used to capture data at a quality level unsurpassed anywhere in the world.

International team of astronomers publish new findings on the evolution of galactic structures Heavy elements like gold, silver, and uranium are apparently more abundant in the Universe than previously assumed. This is the conclusion of an international research team including scientists from the Centre for Astronomy of Heidelberg University that investigated astrophysical processes in star formation regions and particularly the chemical composition of so-called HII regions.

Experts from Egypt and Germany have completed the restoration of the ceiling of the Temple of Esna.

With the aid of the CARMENES spectrograph, a German-Spanish research team led by scientists from Heidelberg University has discovered heretofore unknown exoplanets that could potentially sustain life. The findings were made possible based on data from approximately 20,000 observations recorded between 2016 and 2020 at the Calar Alto Observatory at Almería (Spain) published this year.

Stars like our sun end their lives as white dwarfs. Some of them are surrounded by a planetary nebula consisting of gas ejected by the dying star shortly before its death. An international research team led by Professor Klaus Werner of the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of has for the first time studied a central star of a planetary nebula located in an open star cluster.

They were formed on the Moon more than three billion years ago, brought back to the Earth about 50 years ago, and recently arrived on the campus of the University of Bayreuth: samples of Moon rocks collected by NASA Apollo missions 16 and 17. The US national space agency has made them available to the Bavarian Research Institute of Experimental Geochemistry and Geophysics (BGI) of the University of Bayreuth for scientific investigations.

Before the light comes on and a new star shines, enough gas and dust must accumulate in a very small space for a star's energy source, nuclear fusion, to ignite. This by no means happens at rest. Matter swirls around, and before the star sees the light of day, violent birth labour is not uncommon. The new James Webb Space Telescope has turned its lens on such a spectacle, which reveals itself in unprecedented detail.

Researchers from the University of Bonn are re-analyzing satellite data to calculate global water distribution While some parts of the world suffer extreme heat and persistent drought, others are being flooded. Overall, continental water volumes vary so much over time that global sea levels fluctuate significantly too.

An international team has fitted the core element of the Belle II experiment at the KEK research center in Japan The Belle II cooperation project at the Japanese research center KEK is helping researchers from all over the world to hunt for new phenomena in particle physics. The international experiment has now reached a major milestone after a team successfully installed a new pixel detector in its final location in Japan.

James Webb Space Telescope observations find water for the first time in the inner disk around a young star with giant planets. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, the MPIA-led MINDS research collaboration discovered water in the inner region of a disk of gas and dust around the young star PDS 70.

The star could be a magnetar with properties that have yet to be explained A new type of stellar object could challenge our understanding of neutron stars. An international team, including researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, has discovered a celestial body in the constellation Shield (Scutum) that could be an ultralong-period magnetar, a rare type of star with extremely strong magnetic fields that can produce violent bursts of energy.

When stars, similar to the sun, have reached the end of their lifetime, they inflate into red giant stars. The sun, for example, would then have a diameter hundreds of times larger than today. Whether the Earth will survive this final stage of its home star is uncertain. The planet called Halla around a sun-like star near Polaris, however, was lucky.

For the first time, the scientists of the international IceCube Collaboration have succeeded in detecting neutrinos from the Milky Way. The analysis of ten years of observation data using machine learning methods led to the success for which ORIGINS scientist Elisa Resconi's group at the Technical University of Munich provided important preliminary work.