Max Planck Institutes and Experts

Using state-of-the-art technology and sophisticated data analysis tools, a team from MPIA has developed a new and powerful technique to directly determine the mass of a galaxy hosting an active supermassive central black hole at a distance of nearly 9 billion light-years from Earth. This pioneering method promises a new approach for studying the co-evolution of galaxies and their central black holes, which typically relies on mass determinations.

Astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy have measured for the first time the alignment of magnetic fields in gigantic clouds of gas and dust in a distant galaxy. The results suggest that such magnetic fields play a key role in channelling matter to form denser clouds, and thus in setting the stage for the birth of new stars. The work was published in the November 24 edition 2011 of the journal Nature.

In the collision of neutron stars, the extremely compact remnants of evolved and collapsed stars, two light stars merge to one massive star. The newly-born heavyweight vibrates, sending out characteristic waves in space-time. Model calculations at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics now show how such signals can be used to determine the size of neutron stars and how we can learn more about the interior of these exotic objects.

The famous Millennium Run (MR) simulations now appear in a completely new light: The Millennium Run Observatory (MRObs) project combines detailed predictions from cosmological simulations with a virtual observatory in order to produce synthetic astronomical observations. These virtual observations allow theorists and observers to analyse the purely theoretical data in exactly the same way as they would purely observational data. The team expects that the advantages offered by this approach will lead to a richer collaboration between theoretical and observational astronomers.

Spreading processes occur in many complex systems. They play an important role, for instance, in the formation of epidemics and the spread of evolutionary novelties. Until recently, most theories of those processes ignored or approximated the role of noise. The example of evolution illustrates, however, that random chance effects should not be neglected. We report a substantial advance in the analysis of these and more complex models.