Research groups and projects
Milky Way and the local Volume
Brown dwarfs and low-mass stars; high proper motion survey compared with near-infrared sky surveys; formation of massive stars and their influence on galaxy evolution; distance-calibrators in the form of the Cepheid period-luminosity relation; star formation in the early universe
Galaxies and quasars
Structure of the Milky Way galaxy and of its components; surveys for quasars and Active Galactic Nuclei; host galaxies and environments of AGN; clusters of galaxies; X-ray observations of compact objects; numerical simulations of galaxy formation and evolution.
Cosmology and large-scale structure
Morphology and evolution of large-scale structure, formation of first stars and galaxies, intergalactic medium and background radiation, galaxy formation in a cosmological environment, dark matter halos and dark energy effects in cosmology.
Selected projects
| 4MOST | 4-meter Multi Object Spectroscopic Telescope |
| CLUES | Constrained Local UniversE Simulations; the observed distribution of nearby galaxies is used to construct the initial conditions for these simulations |
| Constellation | International collaboration for the study of the origin of stellar masses and their distribution |
| eROSITA | The mission will provide the first sky survey of intermediate x-ray energies up to 10 keV with high resolution. |
| GALOCS | GALactic Open Cluster Study; German-Russian collaboration supported by DFG; investigation of the population of open clusters in the Solar neighbourhood |
| GEMS | Galaxy Evolution from Morphology and SEDs: An investigation of the largest colour mosaic image ever obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope. |
| MUSE | The Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer is a second generation instrument in development for the Very Large Telescope (VLT). |
| RAVE | The RAdial Velocity Experiment is a survey to measure the radial velocities, metallicities and abundance ratios for up to 1 mill. stars |
| SDSS | The Sloan Digital Sky Survey provides detailed optical images of more than 1/4 of the sky, and a 3D map of about 1 mill. galaxies and quasars. |
| STAGES | Space Telescope A901/902 Galaxy Evolution Survey: a multiwavelength survey to probe the physical drivers of galaxy evolution in dense environments |
| HETDEX/VIRUS | VIRUS will be a giant integral-field unit spectrograph for the optical light |
| XMM-SSC | XMM Survey Science Center at AIP provides the source detection software for the pipe-line processing of the XMM EPIC data. |
Completed projects
| AMIGA | Adaptive Mesh Investigations of Galaxy Assembly; adaptive mesh refinement code for cosmological simulations |
| ARENA | Antarctic Research, a European Network for Astrophysics: Kollaboration zur Förderung von Infrarot- und optischer Astronomie in der Antarktis |
| Young stellar clusters | EU network |
