There is no such thing as "the" Max Planck Institute. In fact, the Max Planck Society operates a number of research institutions in Germany as well as abroad. These Max Planck Institutes are independent and autonomous in the selection and conduct of their research pursuits. To this end, they have their own, internally managed budgets, which can be supplemented by third party project funds. The quality of the research carried out at the institutes must meet the Max Planck Society's excellence criteria. To ensure that this is the case, the institutes' research activities undergo regular quality reviews.
The Max Planck Institutes carry out basic research in the life sciences, natural sciences and the social and human sciences. It is thus almost impossible to allocate an individual institute to one single research field: conversely, it can be the case that different Max Planck Institutes carry out research in the same subject.
A combination of the Herschel Space Observatory with the submillimeter telescope APEX leads to the discovery and characterization of the youngest known protostars yet: stellar embryos still deeply embedded in unexpectedly dense dust cocoons.
Pinpointing the positions of more than 100 of the most fertile star-forming galaxies with the compound telescope ALMA clears up a mystery about these objects' observed productivity – and shows that previous studies had frequently mis-identified such galaxies.
Neutron stars are born as extremely hot and dense objects at the centers of massive stars exploding as supernovae. They cool by intense emission of neutrinos. Three-dimensional supercomputer simulations at the very forefront of current modelling efforts reveal the stunning and unexpected possibility that this neutrino emission can develop a hemispheric (dipolar) asymmetry. If this new neutrino-hydrodynamical instability happens in nature, it will lead to a recoil acceleration of the neutron star and will have important consequences for the formation of chemical elements in stellar explosions.
Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics propose a crucially improved distance measurement. They use a strong gravitational lens system with a time-varying source (e. g. a quasar) to measure the angular diameter distance to the lens.
Biomolecular systems are often challenging to model, because they are inherently multiscale, i.e. small differences in the molecular building blocks can result in significant changes of the larger scale properties. Natural Polysaccharides for instance are typically assembled from a small number of basic sugar types, yet they can display a wide range of exceptional material properties, which derive from their spatial organization. Suitable models need to combine atomistic resolution with coarser representations retaining as much of the characteristics of the highly resolved system as possible.