Speaker:
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April 17, 2025
Solar Orbiter – X-ray view of the Sun
| Dr. Alexander Warmuth
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
This lecture, which will be broadcast on the “Urknall, Weltall und das Leben” (Big Bang, Universe and Life) channel, focusses on scientific results obtained mainly with the STIX X-ray telescope on board the Solar Orbiter spacecraft. The ESA space mission has been orbiting the Sun and analysing our star with its ten different instruments since 2020. The STIX telescope is used to observe the hottest regions and most energetic processes in solar flares. Over the last few years, solar activity has steadily increased, so that researchers have already been able to observe over 70,000 of these eruptions. The research involves combining STIX with other instruments. For example, scientists have produced the first 3D images of solar eruptions in the X-ray range. STIX and other instruments on Solar Orbiter are also used to investigate what is ejected from the Sun, in particular high-energy particles and plasma clouds, and which consequences arise for the Earth and the space weather.
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April 17, 2025
Solar Orbiter - The STIX X-ray telescope
| Dr. Alexander Warmuth
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
Here, anyone who is interested in more details can take a look behind the technical scenes of the STIX X-ray telescope. Dr. Alexander Warmuth addresses various questions: How does an X-ray telescope actually work? How does it produce X-ray images of the Sun, even though the radiation is so energetic that neither lenses nor mirrors can be used in the telescope? What are the requirements for an instrument that comes closer to the Sun than the closest planet Mercury?
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April 1, 2025
Hunting for hidden X-ray treasures in Space
| Dr. Iris Traulsen
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
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March 20, 2025
Sterne im Computertomographen
| Dr. Axel Schwope
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
Tomography is a widely used method of analysis in medicine. A rotating detector takes sectional images which are then used to reconstruct the original image. This allows completely new insights into the interior of the body. Especially interesting is the fact that stars can also be studied using the same method. In this lecture, the methodology is described and applied to very close binary stars. Fascinatingly, we then ‘see’ gas discs, gas streams and half stars.
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March 20, 2025
Comment check: Mit Tomografie ins All blicken? • Fragen zur Astrophysik
| Dr. Axel Schwope
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
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March 18, 2025, 7:15 p.m.
Hubble & Webb Deep Fields – Pictures from the early Universe
| Dr. Tanya Urrutia LIVE
Location: AIP, Campus Babelsberg, Konferenzraum Maria-Margaretha-Kirch-Haus
In 1995, a small revolution in extragalactic astronomy began with the publication of the Hubble Deep Fields. The ‘deep’ observations with very long exposure times in seemingly empty regions of the sky enabled us to look deep into the past of our universe and thus draw statistical conclusions about the development of galaxies. Today, the James Webb Telescope complements the Hubble optical images in the infrared. In her lecture, Tanya Urrutia presents these ‘deep’ images, her own work on complementary spectra with the MUSE instrument at the Very Large Telescope in Chile and gives an outlook on future research in this field.
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Feb. 20, 2025
The age of stars - and how it can be determined
| Dr. David Gruner
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
It’s often not easy to find out how old stars actually are, as the age of a star cannot simply be measured. Instead, researchers use directly measurable properties of stars that change significantly and systematically over the course of a star's life. In his lecture, David Gruner will discuss various methods and measurement parameters that are used to determine the age of stars. One of the reasons why the age of stars is so interesting is that life develops over billions of years and we can therefore learn more about the probability of life on planets around distant stars.
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Jan. 16, 2025
Auf der Suche nach den Röntgenstrahlern im All
| Dr. Iris Traulsen
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
Dr Iris Traulsen invites the audience to join her on the ‘Search for X-ray emitters in the Universe’. The surprising discovery of X-rays from space in the 1960s and the subsequent development of astronomical X-ray detectors opened a new window into the Universe: high-energy, exotic processes can be seen in X-ray light. This ‘cosmic laboratory’ allows us to discover as yet unknown properties of already known astronomical objects as well as still unknown types of objects. The European Space Agency (ESA) operates the large satellite-based X-ray mission XMM-Newton, which started scientific observations in January 2000. For about 20 years, Iris Traulsen has been working with the XMM-Newton data and reports that it hides many as yet unknown astronomical X-ray sources. How can these be tracked down and made accessible to science? The lecture invites you to take a look behind the scenes of a space telescope and dive deeper into the ‘hot universe’.
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Dec. 12, 2024
XMM-Newton-Jubiläum: Wissenschaft am AIP mit dem Röntgenteleskop
| Dr. Iris Traulsen, Dr. Axel Schwope et al.
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
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Dec. 10, 2024
XMM-Newton Anniversary: Science at AIP with the X-ray telescope
| Dr. Iris Traulsen, Dr. Axel Schwope et al.
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
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Dec. 3, 2024
Rotationskurven, Dunkle Materie und MOND
| Dr. Marcel Pawlowski
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
Modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) is one of the most established alternative explanations of dark matter in the context of the dynamics of galaxies. While classical gravitational theory must interpret flat rotation curves of spiral galaxies as evidence for dark matter, MOND provides an alternative description that captures the observed phenomena by fitting the laws of gravity at extremely low accelerations. The successes of MOND in predicting scaling relations such as the Tully-Fisher relation and the radial acceleration relation (RAR) are emphasised. At the same time, the challenges of MOND will be discussed, in particular the recent but highly contradictory results on wide double stars as well as problems in the description of galaxy clusters. The talk will provide a comprehensive overview of the current research results and highlight how MOND provides convincing explanations in certain areas, such as the dynamics of galaxies, but continues to encounter contradictions in other areas.
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Nov. 21, 2024
Wie Galaxien das Modell der Dunklen Materie herausfordern
| Dr. Marcel Pawlowski
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
Large galaxies like our Milky Way are surrounded by numerous smaller satellite galaxies. While observations show only a limited number of these small companions, simulations of cold dark matter predict many more such galaxies. This imbalance became known as the missing satellite galaxy problem. It has been a challenge to our understanding of cosmological structure formation for 25 years. A solution is offered by modern cosmological simulations that take into account not only gravity but also baryonic physics such as the formation of stars and the feedback from supernova explosions. They show that many of the predicted dark matter subhalos do not necessarily harbour visible satellite galaxies. In addition, ever smaller and fainter satellite galaxies are being discovered with observations. However, the latest research findings suggest that researchers may have overshot the mark in solving the problem of missing satellite galaxies: Are we now facing a ‘problem of excess satellite galaxies’?
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Nov. 21, 2024
Intermediate mass black holes - the missing piece
| Dr. Nikolay Kacharov
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
Nikolay Kacharov presents the first reliable evidence of an intermediate-mass black hole. ‘Light’ black holes with stellar masses are formed when massive stars explode as supernovae. Most galaxies, including our own Milky Way, harbour supermassive black holes at their centres, which are usually many orders of magnitude heavier than stellar-mass black holes. But how do these supermassive black holes form? All possible scenarios predict the existence of black holes with an intermediate mass. Despite years of searching and promising candidates, the reliable detection of such an intermediate-mass black hole has proven to be very difficult. This has now been achieved recently: Using current and archived observation data from the Hubble Space Telescope, an international research team has found an intermediate-mass black hole in the centre of the star cluster Omega Centauri.
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Oct. 17, 2024
Die Physik der Galaxienentstehung
| Dr. Rainer Weinberger
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
The next virtual lecture in the Babelsberg Starry Nights series will be online on Thursday at 8 pm. Dr. Rainer Weinberger, head of a Leibniz Junior Research Group at the AIP, will talk about ‘The physics of galaxy formation’. How do galaxies form in our universe? Which physical processes play an important role? With the help of modern computer simulations, researchers are able to find answers to these questions. Starting in the early universe, taking into account the cosmic expansion and gravitational forces, scientists can explain the large-scale structure and spatial distribution of galaxies. To understand star formation in galaxies, additional aspects must be taken into account, in particular the gas dynamics and the interaction of gas with radiation. One of the most important research results of recent years is the role of feedback effects of already formed stars and active galactic nuclei on the evolution of the galaxy itself. For example, stars that explode in a supernova heat up the surrounding gas and drive it apart with strong winds, which can make the formation of new stars much more difficult. Understanding these complex feedback effects in detail is one of the aims of current research at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics.
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Sept. 19, 2024
Our Galaxy has a history
| Dr. Cristina Chiappini
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is one of the most beautiful structures in the sky. We live inside this galaxy, yet it still hasn’t been fully mapped. Thanks to ESA's Gaia satellite, which is on a mission to record data for almost two billions of stars, our understanding of the Milky Way is gradually becoming more complete. In her talk, Cristina Chiappini gives an overview of how astronomers are using Gaia data to show that our galaxy tells a unique story - and how we are in the process of unravelling its past. On this journey, not only the positions and velocities of the stars, but also their chemical composition, serve as ‘fossil records’ clues to the history of the Milky Way.
Only our own galaxy can be studied in such detail, as it is the only one where we have rich information on a large number of individual stars. Nevertheless, parts of the Milky Way’s history also shed light on the formation and evolution of other galaxies and contribute to our understanding of the chemical enrichment of the universe as a whole.
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July 18, 2024
Neues aus der Sonnenumgebung - Braune Zwerge
| Dr. Ralf-Dieter Scholz
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
How many brown dwarfs are there in the solar neighbourhood? Are they all known yet? Dr Ralf-Dieter Scholz addresses these and more questions in his lecture. In addition to his earlier lecture (https://youtu.be/I-3QJrolWok), he presents new findings delivered from the Gaia space mission by European Space Agency (ESA). The Gaia observations in the optical range are only of limited use for brown dwarfs and have not yet been sufficient to determine the distances, proper motions and orbital parameters for components of close multiple systems, i.e. binary stars and also systems with brown dwarfs. However, observations with terrestrial and space telescopes in the infrared range have led to a large number of discoveries of the lowest-mass stars and brown dwarfs in the immediate vicinity of the Sun over the last 25 years, some contributions also came from the AIP. A compilation of all known stars and brown dwarfs up to a distance of 20 parsecs published in 2023 now appears to be complete, at least within 10 parsecs. In the recently published research article Scholz & Mints (2024) in the journal Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society (RNAAS), Ralf-Dieter Scholz and Alexey Mints discuss whether all stellar and substellar neighbours of the Sun within 10 parsecs are now known - or whether doubts would be appropriate.
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June 20, 2024
Von 2024BX1 nach Ribbeck - Meteoritenfund in Brandenburg
| Dr. Jürgen Rendtel
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
Asteroids, small pieces of rock in the solar system, do not usually come very close to us. But on 20 January 2024, a specimen about one metre in size was discovered, which hit the Earth's surface just three hours later. Upon entering the atmosphere, the object lit up as a fireball about as bright as the moon that could be seen from afar in the clear night sky. At the end of its blazing path at an altitude of around 20 kilometres, the fragments fell to the ground as meteorites. Observations of the fireball by video cameras made it possible to calculate the exact location of the fall, which was west of Nauen in Ribbeck.
Search operations were immediately organised to secure the fresh material quickly for investigation. Starting 23 January, a total of more than 200 documented finds were collected and examined. It turned out that the meteorites consist of the extremely rare material aubrite. The meteorite type aubrite is named after the place where the first such piece was found in Aubres, France, in 1836. The small body probably originates from a hot area of our solar system, and has experienced many collisions with other rocks in its history. The material is therefore very fragile; many pieces shattered on impact. The fusion crust is glassy and full of bubbles, and must have solidified very quickly. Individual meteorite samples are still being investigated in laboratories using isotope analysis. This is only the fourth time that pieces of an object previously observed as an asteroid have been found on the ground.
‘It is a great stroke of luck that the asteroid hit right in the middle of Europe, on our doorstep so to speak, and that its orbit could be calculated precisely,’ says Dr Jürgen Rendtel, member of the Solar Physics section, expert on meteorites and successful finder of several meteorite pieces. In his lecture entitled ‘From 2024BX1 to Ribbeck’ (in German), he talks about the discovery of the asteroid and the arduous search for the fragments in the fields near Ribbeck. He also discusses the special properties of the material. A summary of the meteorite search and results to date will be published on 26 June 2024 in an article by Jürgen Rendtel and co-authors in the journal WGN, The Journal of the International Meteor Organisation.
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May 16, 2024
A simple Recipe to make a Galaxy
| Dr. Elena Sacchi
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
Galaxies come in different shapes and sizes, but just like cakes or pies, the main basic ingredients are always the same. In her lecture, the scientist explains what makes the galaxies nevertheless different, which mechanisms are driving the galaxy formation and evolution, and influencing their structure and appearance. She also discusses which impact interactions between galaxies have and how they affect their types and sizes.
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April 18, 2024
eROSITA - Mapping the hot universe
| Dr. Georg Lamer
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
The eROSITA X-ray telescope was launched into space from Baikonur in 2019 with the Spektrum-Röntgen-Gamma (SRG) satellite and mapped the entire sky several times in the X-ray range until February 2022. The German eROSITA consortium has published its share from the first 6-month sky survey and made the largest catalogue of X-ray sources worldwide with 900,000 objects available. In his lecture Georg Lamer introduces the eROSITA project and presents some highlights from the first 6 months of the sky survey.
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March 21, 2024
Binary stars in exchange
| Daniel Pauli, Universität Potsdam
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
In this talk, Daniel Pauli from the University of Potsdam explains his recent research findings. The topic covers massive stars that have many times the mass of our sun. They are very hot and bright and therefore easy to observe. Most massive stars are born as binary stars so they can interact with each other during their lifetime. If the stars exchange mass, this has drastic effects on their future development. But what exactly do we know about these short-lived interactions in binary star systems?
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March 8, 2024, 7 p.m.
4MOST - Observing the sky with 2400 eyes
| Dr. Andreas Kelz LIVE
Location: AIP, Campus Babelsberg, lecture hall in Schwarzschildhaus
The new multi-object spectrograph 4MOST was planned and built under the direction of the AIP and is about to be delivered to the Paranal Observatory in Chile. The first large component was just sent on its way to the VISTA telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, where the instrument will be installed until the end of the year. This instrument scans the sky piece by piece and records up to 2,400 spectra of stars, nebulae, galaxies and other objects at once. In his lecture, Dr Andreas Kelz will discuss the development and construction of the instrument as well as its future scientific use. Please note that the lecture will be given in German.
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Feb. 15, 2024
The Sun as chronometer for physical processes
| apl. Prof. Dr. Carsten Denker
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
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Jan. 23, 2024
Comment check: Hubble Deep Fields & research with new data
| Dr. Tanya Urrutia
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
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Jan. 18, 2024
Deep views into empty space: The Hubble Deep Fields
| Dr. Tanya Urrutia
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
The deep Hubble observations in seemingly empty regions of the sky have revolutionised our understanding of galaxy evolution, especially in the early universe. Dr. Tanya Urrutia explains why these deep fields are so important and how they advance our knowledge, starting from the history of the research field of "extragalactics" to her own work with the MUSE instrument at the Very Large Telescope in Chile.
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Dec. 21, 2023
Back to the moon II
| Dr. Mirko Krumpe
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
Dr. Mirko Krumpe continues his lecture series on the “Return to the Moon” (in German), and presents current developments in this field. He explains why many nations and private enterprises want to go to the moon, and why this is still technically challenging. He also discusses the launch attempts of Starship 1 and 2, the largest and most powerful rockets ever built.
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Nov. 16, 2023
Novae
| Dr. Axel Schwope
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
At the end of a star's life, not much typically happens. The stellar remnant, often a so-called white dwarf, cools down and eventually becomes invisible. In close binary stars with mass overflow, however, a white dwarf can develop a second life. The matter collected by the accompanying normal star leads to some of the most remarkable phenomena in the sky, the novae, the dwarf novae and the supernovae.
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Oct. 19, 2023
4MOST
| Joar Brynnel, Dr. Andreas Kelz, Dr. Roelof de Jong
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
Joar Brynnel gives a German presentation on the new instrument 4MOST, which is being built under the direction of the AIP. Following the lecture, Dr Andreas Kelz, allows the audience a glimpse directly into the integration halls of the institute and explains some of the components of the instrument.
An English lecture on 4MOST including a tour of the integration hall by project leader Dr Roelof de Jong has also just been released as a video and is available on the YouTube channel "videowissen": https://youtu.be/7i97ZZNsdEM
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Sept. 21, 2023
Comment check: Resolved stellar populations - Pleiades and scientific working
| Prof. Dr. Martin Roth
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
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July 20, 2023
Fascinating facts about the Apollo missions
| Dr. Mirko Krumpe
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
20 July marks the anniversary of the first successful landing on the Moon. Today, humankind is again preparing to land on the Earth's satellite. Using the Apollo missions as an example, Mirko Krumpe shows how many ambitious test flights were necessary and still are today before a moon landing can be successfully carried out. The lecture also looks at problems in the missions after Apollo 11 and highlights aspects that are not known to everyone.
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June 15, 2023
Comment check: Influence of supermassive black holes
| Prof. Dr. Christoph Pfrommer
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
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May 18, 2023
LOFAR: A next generation radio telescope
| Dr. Christian Vocks
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
LOFAR is a Europe-wide radio telescope, which consists of quite inconspicuous looking single antennas or antenna fields, which are combined to a radio telescope. One of these antenna fields is located in Potsdam-Bornim. It is used for observing the sun (especially at the AIP), but also for studying other radio sources like pulsars.
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April 20, 2023
Geschüttelt und gerührt: Über den Ursprung großskaliger galaktischer Magnetfelder
| Dr. Oliver Gressel
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
Spiral galaxies like our Milky Way are not only home to billions of stars but also the largest coherent magnets known in the universe. Radio observations with large telescopes like the 100m dish in Effelsberg near Bonn tell us that their magnetism is anchored in the interstellar plasma. The interstellar medium, in turn, is characterized by turbulence, which in turn is continuously driven by stellar explosions. The rotation and stratification of the galaxy as a whole thereby causes systematic turbulence, which enables a so-called dynamo. This effect describes the emergence of large-scale galactic magnetic fields, which are difficult to explain otherwise.
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March 16, 2023
Robotic Telescopes at AIP
| Dr. Thomas Granzer
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
More than two decades ago, AIP began construction of its STELLA robotic observatory, which today consists of two 1.2-metre telescopes used for high-resolution spectroscopy and photometry, respectively. At the time, it was the first robotic high-resolution spectroscopic telescope ever built; to date, there are few projects that meet this challenge. Although it was built primarily for stellar research, it has been used successfully in other fields as well. In this talk, Thomas Granzer will give an overview of the technology and software developments that have been instrumental in the successful operation of the observatory and present the most important scientific results.
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Feb. 16, 2023
Comment check: Rotating Black Holes and accretion disks
| Prof. Dr. Christoph Pfrommer
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
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Jan. 19, 2023
Meteorite craters on Earth
| Dr. Jürgen Rendtel
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
Meteorite craters are found on many celestial bodies, but on Earth most of these craters are no longer recognizable as such due to subsequent processes. In this lecture Dr. Jürgen Rendtel explains with various examples how meteorite impacts occur and how exactly the craters are formed.
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Dec. 15, 2022
How the Sun influences Earth: Space Weather
| Dr. Stefan Hofmeister
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
During coronal mass ejections of the sun, the dependency on modern technology becomes particularly clear and in the past there have already been sensitive effects. Stefan Hofmeister shows examples and explains which solar activities are also a great danger for our digital life besides the coronal mass ejection.
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Nov. 17, 2022
Towards the Sun – Update for Solar Orbiter
| Dr. Alexander Warmuth
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
ESA's Solar Orbiter spacecraft was launched in February 2020 and has been in its science mission phase since its Earth-flyby about a year ago. In this talk, Alexander Warmuth will present some of the first scientific results of this space mission.
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Oct. 20, 2022
Comment check: Dark matter • Interaction with galaxies and black holes
| Dr. Ewald Puchwein
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
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Sept. 15, 2022
Comment check: Gas nebulae in galaxy clusters • Dark matter density • Gas mass
| Dr. Ewald Puchwein
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
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Aug. 7, 2022
Comment check: Das Schicksal junger Planeten: Wie Sterne ihre Planeten formen
| Laura Ketzer
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
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June 16, 2022
Comment check: Die glorreichen Sieben – Sieben ,nackte' Neutronensterne am Röntgenhimmel
| Dr. Axel Schwope
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
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May 19, 2022
Gezeitenwechselwirkung zwischen Sternen und Planeten
| Nikoleta Ilic
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
Stars and planets can interact with each other in different ways. One interesting but also important way is tidal interaction. Even though our solar system has eight planets, even the closest planet to the Sun is too far away to have a significant tidal effect on it. However, we are aware of tidal interaction because we can observe it between planets and their moons (e.g. the Earth and its Moon). The discovery of exoplanets has enabled us to measure the influence of tides between stars and planets. So far, we have observed many planets around other stars that are so close to their parent stars that measurable tidal interaction can take place. In this lecture, possible consequences of tides on stars will be explained.
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May 1, 2022
Comment check: Das Schicksal junger Planeten: Wie Sterne ihre Planeten formen
| Laura Ketzer
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
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April 21, 2022
Comment check: Dark matter and the dance of dwarf galaxies
| Dr. Marcel Pawlowski
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
With more than 64,000 views, a large number of questions and comments have accumulated under the video since May 2021. Marcel Pawlowski answers some of them, including those on topics such as the distinction between star clusters and dwarf galaxies and deeper considerations on dark matter and modified gravity.
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March 17, 2022
The Magnificent Seven - Seven "Naked" Neutron Stars in the X-ray Sky
| Dr. Axel Schwope
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
About 25 years ago, the X-ray satellite ROSAT discovered a rare class of neutron stars. When ROSAT work was completed, there were exactly seven, then called "The Magnificent Seven". Their peculiarity is that one can actually see and consequently study their surface. The lecture summarizes our knowledge of these small noble stars and gives an outlook on the surveys with the X-ray telescope eROSITA.
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Feb. 17, 2022
Galaxy Clusters – Giants in Space
| Dr. Ewald Puchwein
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
Galaxy clusters are the largest single objects in the universe. The talk explains what properties they have and why we know that, in addition to galaxies, they also contain large amounts of extremely hot gas and dark matter. Galaxy clusters also serve as an ideal laboratory to study the properties of dark matter and a number of other exciting astrophysical processes.
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Jan. 30, 2022
Comment check: Sonne: Was heizt die Korona auf Millionen Kelvin? Schwankt die Heliosphäre?
| Dr. Alexander Warmuth
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
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Jan. 20, 2022
Resolved stellar populations - from Galileo Galilei to the Extremely Large Telescope
| Prof. Dr. Martin Roth
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
Galileo Galilei is (presumably) the first person to succeed, with the help of a first-generation telescope, in resolving the band of the Milky Way, which shines diffusely in the sky for the naked eye, into stars. At any rate, he first published this in his famous book "Siderius Nuntius" in 1610. Starting from this historical milestone, the lecture recapitulates the development of important methods of modern astrophysics for the determination of stellar parameters, such as photometry and the construction of colour-brightness diagrams, and spectroscopy and the construction of the Hertzsprung-Russel diagram. The importance of the development of technology since observation by eye, via photography to modern semiconductor image sensors is described. A local reference to the Babelsberg Observatory is the use of the photoelectric effect for objective brightness measurement, first applied by Paul Guthnick in 1913: in analogy to electronics, the emergence of a technology now called photonics.
The main part of the lecture is devoted to the still young field of integral field spectroscopy for the spatial resolution of densely packed stellar populations in globular clusters and nearby galaxies. As a further development of the extremely successful investigation of resolved stellar populations by means of "crowded field photometry", in particular with the Hubble Space Telescope, to "crowded field spectroscopy", it will be shown by means of examples that the unique instrument MUSE opens up a completely new dimension of quantitative spectroscopy, which promises brilliant prospects for groundbreaking work by astrophysicists, especially with the future Extremely Large Telescope of the ESO.
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Jan. 11, 2022
Comment check: Exoplaneten • Alfvén's Theorem • bekannte Unbekannte vs. unbekannte Unbekannte
| Ekaterina Ilin
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
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Dec. 21, 2021
Comment check: Are brown dwarfs candidated for dark matter?
| Dr. Ralf-Dieter Scholz
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
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Dec. 16, 2021
Das Schicksal junger Planeten: Wie Sterne ihre Planeten formen
| Laura Ketzer
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
In addition to planetary formation and the question of how the Earth came into being, a major research focus is also on the further development of planets. What influences are particularly young planets exposed to and how does this affect their ageing and ultimately their fate? The fact is, young exoplanets grow up in a dangerous environment: their home stars produce huge amounts of high-energy X-rays and UV radiation, which can heat up the atmosphere of exoplanets, sometimes even literally boiling it away. What evidence is there for the evaporation of planetary atmospheres and what is the matter with the observed bimodal size distribution of exoplanets and the so-called radius valley?
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Dec. 7, 2021
Comment check: Habitable Planets around Brown Dwarfs
| Dr. Ralf-Dieter Scholz
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
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Nov. 18, 2021
Schwarze Löcher im Universum
| Prof. Dr. Christoph Pfrommer
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
Black holes are among the most mysterious objects in our universe. But what do we really know about them and what is science fiction? In this lecture, we will embark on a journey to the limits of our knowledge and learn what makes black holes so fascinating. Christoph Pfrommer will explain the observations that finally convinced astrophysicists that black holes exist in reality and that were recently honoured with two Nobel Prizes. In addition, the scientist will present theories that explain the formation and growth of cosmic objects. But black holes are not isolated in the universe, they can even influence the evolution of galaxies and galaxy clusters. By studying black holes, we better understand the mysteries of cosmological structure formation.
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Nov. 9, 2021
Comment check: Solar Orbiter • Earth fly-by in Nov 2021 • Space trash • Heat protection
| Dr. Alexander Warmuth
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
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Oct. 21, 2021
Viel Wirbel um Sternenstaub – Die Strömungsmechanik der Planetenentstehung
| Dr. Oliver Gressel
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
The question of how the Earth on which we are standing formed is closely linked to the formation of the solar system. The discovery of thousands of exoplanets in the last decade has not only made this topic more relevant, but has also added new dimensions, such as the question of how far exoplanet systems differ from our own, and whether this has its origin in their formation history.
It shall not be concealed that the major themes around planet formation represents a large unsolved puzzle, of which we understand some individual pieces quite well, but in which others present us with great challenges. New developments in the study of planet formation often build on insights from fluid mechanics, especially in the early stages. There, interstellar stardust is aggregated in order to build objects comparable to asteroids and comets, from which planets are then formed by collision. Magnetic fields often play a central role in this process because they influence the dynamics of the chaotic flows.
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Sept. 23, 2021
The discovery of Neptune
| Prof. Dr. Matthias Steinmetz
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
In his lecture on the history of the discovery of Neptune, Professor Matthias Steinmetz reports on the events during the night of discovery, the various efforts of astronomers at the time to find another planet, and the controversies that followed the discovery.
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Aug. 19, 2021
Towards the Sun: The mission Solar Orbiter
| Dr. Alexander Warmuth
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
The Sun, our home star, has always been of great importance to mankind. Since ancient times, the sun has been intensively observed and researched with ever new methods, yet it still puzzles us today. Therefore, on February 10, 2020, the space probe "Solar Orbiter" set out on its journey to the sun to study it at close range. One of the instruments on board is the X-ray telescope STIX, which was developed and built with involvement from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP). In this talk, Dr. Alexander Warmuth gives an insight into the planning, construction and launch of the space probe and present first data from the mission.
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July 25, 2021
Comment check: Neptune: Super sharp pictures from the edge of our Solar System
| Dr. Tanya Urrutia
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
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July 15, 2021
Distant Suns and their planets: a magnetic Tango
| Ekaterina Ilin
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
We can see almost none of our closest neighbouring stars in the Milky Way with the naked eye. Only with a telescope do their fascinating physics reveal themselves. Small, cool, faint: at first glance they seem inconspicuous. But on closer inspection, we discover enormous magnetic explosions, extensive starspots, and energetic radiation that literally makes their big sister, the Sun, look old. In this lecture, we will travel to some of them and explore how the planets that orbit many of them fare in this extreme environment.
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July 4, 2021
Comment check: Cosmic roommates
| Prof. Dr. Klaus G. Strassmeier
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
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June 17, 2021
Comment check: eROSITA one year in space
| Dr. Axel Schwope
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
In a separate comment check video, Dr. Schwope now addresses the many questions and comments on the talk, including such exciting questions as whether life is possible in globular clusters and how exactly eROSITA contributes to the study of dark energy.
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May 20, 2021
Dark matter and the dance of dwarf galaxies
| Dr. Marcel Pawlowski
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
Large galaxies like our Milky Way are surrounded by a multitude of smaller dwarf galaxies. Cosmological computer simulations predict that these dwarf galaxies perform a chaotic dance. Observations, however, point to a surprisingly orderly choreography. This discrepancy challenges our model of cosmology and galaxy formation, and could fundamentally challenge our understanding of dark matter and gravity.
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May 2, 2021
Comment check: Planets around other stars
| Prof. Dr. Katja Poppenhäger
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
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April 15, 2021
Coole neighbours: Brown dwarfs and red dwarf stars in the local environment of our Sun
| Dr. Ralf-Dieter Scholz
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
The stars in the immediate vicinity of the Sun are mostly cool red dwarf stars. Also cool is the search for still hidden, inconspicuous cosmic neighbours. There is an astonishing amount of stars to discover, especially extremely faint brown dwarfs. Among the discoveries of recent years is Scholz's Star, which not long ago approached the Sun up to a distance five times closer than today's known nearest neighbour, Proxima Centauri. Further cosmic encounters are being detected and predicted with the help of the European space telescope Gaia.
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March 18, 2021
Neptune: Super Sharp Pictures from the Edge of our Solar System
| Dr. Tanya Urrutia
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
In summer 2018, a new mode of the MUSE instrument in Chile captured the sharpest image of Neptune since 1989, when the Voyager 2 probe visited the gas giant. In the lecture, Dr Tanya Urrutia will use the image to introduce the principles of adaptive optics. Turbulence in the atmosphere makes astronomical images look blurry. With the technique of adaptive optics, in which extremely powerful lasers are shot into the sky, researchers can remove these turbulence effects and thus produce very sharp images. Scientific applications using this new method will also be presented.
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Feb. 18, 2021
How massive stars form galaxies
| Anika Beer
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
Massive stars are proportionally fewer in number than low-mass stars, but they have a much greater influence on their environment and the evolution of galaxies. In this lecture, we will learn about the life cycle of massive stars as well as some exotic phases. In addition, the following questions will be answered: How heavy is the most massive star? What role do massive stars play in galaxy evolution? And: How can we actually observe these stars?
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Jan. 21, 2021
Cosmic roommates: The search for life in the universe
| Prof. Dr. Klaus G. Strassmeier
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
Are we as a species alone in the universe, or is the universe as full of life as our blue planet? We don't know yet, but the rapid development in the discovery and exploration of extrasolar planets in recent years has lifted such questions out of the speculative and into the fact-based sciences. Never before have we been so close to solving the Drake equation, which predicts the number of communicating civilisations in our Galaxy. The talk will describe the astrophysically relevant facts for the preconditions for life as we know it, and reveal some quite astonishing projections from our own biological-social behaviour.
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Dec. 17, 2020
Planets around other stars - from exotic to Earth-like
| Prof. Dr. Katja Poppenhäger
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
Prof. Dr. Katja Poppenhäger, head of the Department of Stellar Physics and Exoplanets at the AIP, will present the exotic siblings of the planets in our solar system. How many planets orbiting other stars have already been discovered? What different species live in the exoplanet zoo? And is there possibly a second Earth?
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Dec. 13, 2020
Christmas, George Washington's birthday and a high noon in the afternoon - From the history of time measurements and calendars
| Prof. Dr. Matthias Steinmetz
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
What do Christmas, George Washington's birthday and a high noon in the afternoon have to do with each other? In his lecture, Prof. Dr. Matthias Steinmetz tells amusing and curious stories from the history of time measurement and calendaring. On a short journey through history, he provides exciting insights into how astronomy, political events and social developments are intertwined.
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Nov. 19, 2020
The origin of stars
| Dr. Philipp Girichidis
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
Dr. Philipp Girichidis, researcher in the Cosmology and High-Energy Astrophysics section at the AIP, will explain how stars are born, where in the interstellar medium and under what physical conditions stars and stellar clusters can form, and will also go into the characteristics of molecular clouds. The lecture will be held in German.
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Oct. 15, 2020
The new image of the X-ray sky: eROSITA one year in space
| Dr. Axel Schwope
The link for this talk is going to be published soon.
Dr. Axel Schwope will begin with a lecture on "The new image of the X-ray sky: eROSITA one year in space". After a successful launch and a slightly bumpy commissioning phase, the eROSITA X-ray telescope has produced its first complete map of the X-ray sky. In just half a year, it found more X-ray objects in the sky than all other telescopes combined over the last 60 years. Although the scientific evaluation has only just begun, Axel Schwope can already report on some initial fascinating results and astonishing discoveries.
