news 2024

A pulsar within a few thousand light-years of Earth could have accelerated electrons and positrons to the extreme energies now measured by the H.E.S.S.-Observatory Five telescopes of the H.E.S.S.-collaboration in Namibia are used to study cosmic radiation, especially gamma radiation. In data from ten years of observations, the researchers have now been able to detect cosmic electrons and positrons with an unprecedented energy of more than ten tera-electronvolts (1 TeV corresponds to 10^12 electronvolts).

The ATLAS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) reported the first observation of top quarks in collisions between lead ions in a talk held at CERN last week. Members of the research group of Matthias Schott from the Physikalisches Institut at the University of Bonn have been contributing to this new study.

Nested morphology of gas streams confirms a mechanism that helps infant stars to grow by ingesting disk material. Planet-forming disks, maelstroms of gas and dust swirling around young stars, are nurseries that give rise to planetary systems, including our solar system. Astronomers have discovered new details of gas flows that sculpt and shape those disks over time.

New all-sky survey by the MeerKAT radio telescope shows the universe as expected at large distances - unlike previous observations by other telescopes The cosmological principle is the foundation of modern cosmology and has been confirmed many times by observations and computer models. It states that the universe looks the same from every location and in all directions on a large scale.

Researchers from the Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat have developed a method to model a central theory of quantum gravity in the laboratory. Their goal: to decipher previously unexplained phenomena in the quantum world. Gravity is no longer a mystery to physicists - at least when it comes to large distances: thanks to science, we can calculate the orbits of planets, predict tides, and send rockets into space with precision.

Bright yellow deposits in Consus Crater bear witness to dwarf planet Ceres' cryovolcanic past - and revive the debate about its place of origin. The dwarf planet Ceres has a diameter of almost 1000 kilometres and is located in the asteroid belt. In the television series -The Expanse-, Ceres gained new fame as the main base of the so called -belters-: in this series, which is based on real physics, humans colonize the asteroid belt for mining.

University of Göttingen involved in the development of a new high-resolution astro camera The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has taken an important step towards its 40-meter class telescope, the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), which is currently under construction: the high-resolution camera, Multi-AO Imaging Camera for Deep Observations (MICADO), has passed the final design review.

In young planetary systems, gas giants form more efficiently and faster than previously assumed as shown by new computer simulations. Ring-shaped perturbations in disks of gas and dust orbiting young stars can trigger the formation of several gas giants, as researchers from the ORIGINS Cluster of Excellence, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Göttingen report in the current issue of the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Researchers from the University of Münster analysed 202 fragments At the beginning of this year, on 21 January, a huge fireball was visible over the German state of Brandenburg. It was the result of a small celestial body entering the Earth's atmosphere, bursting and falling to the ground in numerous fragments near Ribbeck in the Havelland.

An image of the the James Webb Space Telescope shows the oldest and coldest known exoplanet Using the James Webb Space Telescope, a team of astronomers led by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy imaged a new exoplanet that orbits a star in the nearby triple system Epsilon Indi. The planet is a cold super-Jupiter exhibiting a temperature of around 0 degrees Celsius and a wide orbit comparable to that of Neptune around the Sun.

With 8200 solar masses, the black hole fills the evolutionary gap between stellar and supermassive black holes Newly identified fast-moving stars in the star cluster Omega Centauri provide solid evidence for a central black hole in the cluster. With at least 8200 solar masses, it is the best candidate for a class of black holes astronomers have long believed to exist: intermediate-mass black holes, formed in the early stages of galaxy evolution.

Investigations with participation by Heidelberg scientists show that later emerging small bodies brought water to the Earth Age data for certain classes of meteorite have made it possible to gain new findings on the origin of small water-rich astronomical bodies in the early solar system. These so-called planetesimals continually supplied building materials for planets - also for the Earth, whose original material contained little water.

Study provides new insights into the gravitational interactions between colliding black holes and answers to fundamental questions in physics. Under the leadership of Jan Plefka from the Department of Physics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU), an international team has described the dynamics of colliding black holes with unprecedented mathematical precision.

Heidelberg researchers played a leading role in evaluating the data from the Gaia space observatory A mere 2,000 light years from Earth lies a black hole approximately 33 times the mass of the sun. The object known as Gaia BH3 - the most massive black hole ever discovered in the Milky Way - was detected with the aid of the Gaia space observatory of the European Space Agency (ESA).

Almost four billion light years away from Earth in the centre of the galaxy OJ287, two giant black holes orbit each other, which are approximately 18 billion and 150 million times more massive than our sun. The larger of the two black holes is surrounded by a vast accretion disk, a rotating disk of matter that flows towards the black hole at its centre.

In the search for signals from the early universe, the Heidelberg scientist Georg Wolschin deals with the question of whether and how residual spectral lines from the recombination phase with the formation of the first elements can be detected in the cosmic background radiation - which can be measured very precisely today.

ESA's space telescope reveals secrets of the cosmos. University of Bonn is involved Today, the Euclid Consortium publishes the first scientific publications on observations with the Euclid space telescope. In a first early observation phase, some scientifically spectacular results have already been achieved.

  Observations made by the Euclid telescope show the world the discovery of free-floating new-born planets, of a new dwarf galaxy and many more.

New scientific data from the Euclid Space Telescope reveals the mystery of the faint glow in the Perseus galaxy cluster The Perseus galaxy cluster was one of the first targets of ESA's Euclid space telescope. It contains thousands of brilliant galaxies, as heavy as 650 trillion suns, held together by their own gravity.

High temperatures and extreme wind speeds influence the chemistry inside the planet's atmosphere. Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a team of astronomers, including scientists from MPIA, constructed a global temperature map of the hot, gas giant exoplanet WASP-43b.