A team of scientists headed by Ivan Minchev from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) has found a way to reconstruct the evolutionary history of our galaxy, the Milky Way, to a new level of detail.

The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften - BBAW) has elected Matthias Steinmetz, Director of the Leibniz Institute Potsdam (AIP), as a full member of the Academy. To be appointed, scientists must distinguish themselves through outstanding scientific achievements.

Two high performance instruments from Potsdam-Babelsberg arrived at the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) in Arizona, the largest reflector telescope in the world. The so-called PFUs (Permanent Fibre Units) provide both telescope control and the transmission of starlight collected via the telescope mirror to the spectrograph PEPSI (“Potsdam Echelle Polarimetric and Spectroscopic Instrument”).

For successfully bridging the gap between astronomy as a hobby and the world of science, Axel Schwope of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam has been acknowledged.

Astronomers have discovered that our Galaxy wobbles. An international team of astronomers around Mary Williams from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) detected and examined this phenomenon with the RAdial Velocity Experiment (RAVE), a survey of almost half a million stars around the Sun. In addition to the regular Galactic rotation the scientists found the Milky Way moving perpendicular to the Galactic plane.

Physicians and astrophysicists work on a new diagnostic method.

Horst Künzel died aged 92 on 2013 September 20. His professional and scientific career was exceptional.

The Karl-Schwarzschild Medal, one of the most honoured awards for astronomical research, goes to Karl-Heinz Rädler, scientist at at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP). The Astronomische Gesellschaft (Astronomical Society) honours him for his research in the area of magnetohydrodynamic.

A new book by Günther Rüdiger, scientist at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP), and his two colleagues Leonod L. Kitchatinov and Rainer Hollerbach explores magnetic effects in cosmic objects.

The Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) received the certificate from “berufundfamilie gGmbH”. The award highlights the efforts of AIP as a family-friendly employer in Brandenburg.

At the beginning of August 1913 the Berlin Observatory – ancestor of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) – moved to Potsdam-Babelsberg. 100 years later the AIP celebrates this anniversary.

Today, astronomers with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) released a new online public data set featuring 60,000 stars that are helping to tell the story of how our Milky Way galaxy formed.

An international team of astronomers led by Soeren Meibom of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has found two planets smaller than Neptune orbiting Sun-like stars in the open star cluster NGC 6811. The discovery, published in the journal Nature, shows that planets can develop even in crowded clusters jam-packed with stars.

Until last Friday more than hundred scientists from Europe, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Canada, Japan and the US discussed the latest news in high-resolution spectroscopy and the developement of a new generation of spectroscopes for the ELT. They were invited to come to Potsdam by the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) to join the institute's 10th ThinkShop, an event supported by the DFG.

The "Leibniz-Kolleg Potsdam" awards young scientists for their achievements in the field of publication and research.

New results pin down the distance to the galaxy next door. - After nearly a decade of careful observations an international team of astronomers, among them Jesper Storm, scientist at the Leibniz-Institute for Astophysics Potsdam (AIP), has measured the distance to our neighbouring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, more accurately than ever before. This new measurement also improves our knowledge of the rate of expansion of the Universe — the Hubble Constant — and is a crucial step towards understanding the nature of the mysterious dark energy that is causing the expansion to accelerate. The team used telescopes at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile as well as others around the globe. These results appear in the 7 March 2013 issue of the journal Nature.

The Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) and the University of Potsdam jointly offer eight PhD stipends within the Graduate School focussing on »quantitative Spectroscopy in Astrophysics«.

Astronomers of the international CLUES collaboration have identified “Cosmic Web Stripping” as a new way of explaining the famous missing dwarf problem: the lack of observed dwarf galaxies compared with that predicted by the theory of Cold Dark Matter and Dark Energy.