Scientific Highlights
Nearby galaxy shows how the young, dark Universe became illuminated
March 25 2019. A team of astronomers found a nearby star-forming galaxy to emit energetic photons in a similar way to the first generation of galaxies. These first galaxies turned the Universe transparent, less than one billion years after the Big Bang.
Stellar Cartography
19 March 2019. The Potsdam Echelle Polarimetric and Spectroscopic Instrument (PEPSI) at the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) in Arizona released its first image of the surface magnetic field of another star. In a paper in the European journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, the PEPSI team presents a Zeeman- Doppler-Image of the surface of the magnetically active star II Pegasi.
Milky Way and beyond: Next Generation Survey Telescope
6 March 2019. The 4-metre Multi-Object Spectroscopic Telescope 4MOST will be the largest spectroscopic survey facility of its kind in the Southern hemisphere and address today’s most pressing astronomical questions in the fields of Galactic archaeology, high-energy astrophysics, galaxy evolution and cosmology. With the publication of 13 papers, the consortium introduces 4MOST to the scientific community.
Energetic electrons produced by shocks on the Sun
22 February 2019. Our Sun is an active star. Its activity manifests not only in the well-known 11-year Sun spot cycle but also in terms of short lived eruptions in its outer, hot atmosphere: the corona.
Disentangling starlight
31 January 2019. Although they look like fuzzy patches of light, distant galaxies are actually made up of billions of stars and other astronomical objects. Telescopes are rarely powerful enough to study individual stars in galaxies except for those closest to the Milky Way, but a team of scientists has now used the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to resolve the stars in the spiral galaxy NGC 300.
Historical star data digitally available
24 October 2018. The large-scale digitization project APPLAUSE provides historical photographic plates from more than one hundred years of astronomical observation of numerous observatories online. The digital archive, equipped with special functions by the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP), not only preserves the historical inventory, but also offers the observation data of that time in a form that can be used for today's research. For example, time gaps in studies of long-term variable stars can be filled.
Journey to the Beginning of Time
8 October 2018. With the Pristine survey, an international team is looking for and researching the oldest stars in our Universe. The goal is to learn more about the young Universe right after the Big Bang. In a recent publication, the scientists have reported on the discovery of a particularly metal-poor star: a messenger from the distant past.
The glowing Universe
1 October 2018. Using the MUSE spectrograph at the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), scientists have uncovered vast cosmic reservoirs of atomic hydrogen surrounding distant galaxies. The international team led by Lutz Wisotzki, Professor of Observational Cosmology at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) and the University of Potsdam, observed for the first time how far such luminous hydrogen clouds extend into space. The researchers now report on this in the current issue of "Nature".
Uncovering the birthplaces of stars in the Milky Way
13 September 2018. An international team of scientists led by Ivan Minchev of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) has found a way to recover the birth places of stars in our Galaxy. This is one of the major goals in the field of Galactic Archaeology, whose aim is to reconstruct the formation history of the Milky Way.
Sun under double observation
13 August 2018. NASA's Parker Solar Probe, launched on 12th August, will be the first spacecraft to approach the sun reaching 10 solar radii, and will provide science with new insights into our home star over the next few years. An international project under the auspices of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) adds ground-based measurements at the same time - enabling completely new insights into solar activity and its effects on Earth.
Digging deeper: First catalogue of X-ray sources in overlapping observations published
25 July 2018. Members of the X-ray astronomy working group at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics (AIP) and an international team have published the first catalogue of X-ray sources in multiply observed sky regions. The catalogue comprises almost 72,000 objects, partly of exotic nature, which were observed with the space-based X-ray telescope XMM-Newton. It provides information on the physical properties of the sources and enables astronomers to identify brightness variations on time scales of several years - and includes several thousand new detections.
Neptune closer than ever: Super Sharp Pictures form the Edge of our Solar System
18 July 2018. Astronomers from the Leibniz-Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) tested as part of an international team a new observation mode with the MUSE instrument at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile in June 2018. The technology used for the first time suppresses the blurred effects of the atmosphere even better and produces very sharp images of planets, stars and galaxies – among others of Neptune, which was once discovered at the predecessor institute of the AIP.
Using Very Pristine Stars to Study Dwarf Galaxies & the Galactic Halo
6 June 2018. Kris Youakim from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) is talking this week at the 232nd AAS meeting about his latest results on the analysis of the stellar debris in the galactic halo. Our Milky Way is a relatively large galaxy, and the current accepted theories suggest that it was built up over time by the accretion of smaller, low-mass galaxies.
Spinning rugby balls: The rotation of the most massive galaxies
23 May 2018. By targeting the most massive galaxies in our universe, astronomers have studied how their stars move. The results are surprising: while half of them spin around their short axis as expected, the other half turn around their long axis. Such kinematics are most likely the result of a special type of galaxy merger, involving already massive, similar-mass galaxies. This would imply that the growth of the most massive and the largest galaxies is governed by these rare events.
Sun in sight: Tailored solution for collaborative research
14 May 2018. Since 2014, Europe's largest solar telescope GREGOR has been used for scientific measurements and has collected large amounts of very complex, multidimensional data during this time. To make these immense amount of data usable and accessible for the research community, scientists of the departments of Solar Physics and E-Science at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) have now developed a Collaborative Research Environment (CRE). The results were presented in a recently released special issue of the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series on Big Data in Solar and Stellar Physics.
1.69 billion stars
25 April 2018. Derived from 22 months of observations, the much awaited second data release of the Gaia mission is now public. The Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) contributed to the common effort with software modules providing first look validation and background correction for the data of the radial velocity spectrometer. Additionally AIP is one of the official Gaia Partner Data Centres that host a mirror of the complete Gaia archive.
Hide and Seek: a Black Hole in a Giant Star Cluster
17 January 2018. Astronomers, under the lead of the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and with participation of the Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP) using ESO’s MUSE instrument on the Very Large Telescope in Chile have discovered a star in the cluster NGC 3201 that is behaving very strangely. It appears to be orbiting an invisible black hole with about four times the mass of the Sun — the first such inactive stellar-mass black hole found in a globular cluster and the first found by directly detecting its gravitational pull. This important discovery impacts on our understanding of the formation of these star clusters, black holes, and the origins of gravitational wave events.
First PEPSI data release
9 January 2018. The Potsdam Echelle Polarimetric and Spectroscopic Instrument (PEPSI) at the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) in Arizona released its first batch of high-spectral resolution data to the scientific community. In a series of three papers in the European journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, the PEPSI team presents a new spectral atlas of the Sun, a total of 48 atlases of bright benchmark stars, and a detailed analysis of the chemical abundances of the 10-billion year old planet-system host Kepler-444.
MUSE most detailed look at galaxy field
29 November 2017. Astronomers using the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile focused on the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, measuring distances and properties of 1600 very faint galaxies including 72 galaxies that have never been detected before. This resulted in the deepest spectroscopic observations ever made and 10 science papers that are being published in a special issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Light in the dark - Galaxies enriching MultiDark universe
20 November 2017. Scientists from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) have joined an international research team to create one of the largest sets of galaxies in a computer generated universe. The data are published via AIP's CosmoSim database.
