Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research

The unique data from ESA's Solar Orbiter spacecraft aims to explain why the Sun's activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle.

New research suggests that the body that collided with Earth 4.5 billion years ago, creating the Moon, originated in the inner Solar System

The Mars rover Perseverance has collected numerous samples that are to be sent to Earth. Current studies are preparing for the future handling of this material.

The Solar Orbiter is the first spacecraft to study the Sun's poles – and finds the magnetic field in a state of flip

Just a few months after it was launched, the spacecraft observed one of the most violent flare eruptions on the sun – from its origin to its full release.

Max Planck researchers collaborate with partners in more than 120 countries. Some of them have kindly agreed to write about their personal experiences and observations for our website. Dietmar Germerott from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen spent 11 weeks at the Esrange Space Center balloon and rocket base in northern Sweden, where he watched over the Sunrise III mission. Here, he recounts his experiences from the launch of the balloon-borne solar observatory.

Life on Earth, as we know it today, exists thanks to many coincidences – and the planet Jupiter. Its weighty role in the Solar System is one aspect of its turbulent history, a subject Thorsten Kleine and Joanna Drążkowska investigate using meteorites and computer simulations at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen.

Hans-Peter Doerr from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research spent three weeks working at the Big Bear Solar Observatory in California. He explains why the solar telescope stands on the water and tells us about anglers, gun enthusiasts, and alternative ways of transporting data.

The bizarre landscape seen in the photo is literally not of this world. Rather, the image shows the central area of the Occator crater on Ceres – a dwarf planet with a diameter of around 950 kilometers.

Small bodies orbiting the Sun are either comets or asteroids – for many years, this was the official line in textbooks. At the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Goettingen, Jessica Agarwal is studying “active asteroids”, small solar system bodies that don’t quite fit into the traditional categories.

Less than three years after the start of its scientific research mission, the space probe Solar Orbiter has already provided new and unique insights into the Sun. The observational data allow conclusions about the origin of the solar wind, reveal the smallest flares of radiation in the Sun's hot corona and, in collaboration with other space probes, offer an all-round view of our star's magnetic field. The Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research plays a leading role in four of the scientific instruments on board.

Rock samples from Earth and Mars are contemporary witnesses of planet formation. Their composition provides clues as to how both bodies became the planets we know today over the course of millions of years. New studies of the isotope ratios of the metals molybdenum, titanium, zirconium and zinc in Martian meteorites suggest that the building material of both planets originated largely from the inner solar system. In the final phase of their development, however, the two unequal neighbors must have evolved differently.

Understanding the Sun’s magnetic activity requires us to understand the large-scale motions that drive the magnetic fields inside the Sun. These motions are driven by small-scale rotating convection. Our current best models for the large-scale dynamics are very wrong, and do not even predict the correct sign for the Sun’s latitudinal differential rotation – the Sun’s poles are observed to rotate slower (taking about 35 days for one rotation) than the equator (which takes about 25 days). 

Planetary radiation belts are those regions near a planet where the intrinsic magnetic field is strong enough to trap energetic charged particles like electrons and protons. In the past processes in the radiation belts of the Earth were thought to be the benchmark for all the other planetary radiation belts in the solar system. However, recently measurements onboard the Cassini spacecraft in the Kronian system have shown that Saturn’s belts are very different compared to Earth. A particle detector built at the MPI for Solar System research (MPS) even discovered a new, formerly unknown belt.

The brightness variability of the Sun and other cool stars is one of the most exciting manifestations of the interaction between the matter and the magnetic field in their atmospheres. The recently achieved unprecedented precision of stellar brightness measurements as well as the progress in simulations of stellar atmospheres allows coming closer to understanding the origin of stellar magnetic activity and resulting brightness variations. Furthermore, stellar data allows constraining solar magnetic activity in the past and future as well as the resulting solar-terrestrial connection.