Max Planck Institutes and Experts

In 2020, a new virus appeared and changed almost everything in our lives. One of the uplifting experiences of the pandemic has been to see how many scientists have risen to the occasion and applied whatever competences they have to understand and mitigate the situation – as we did at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

China’s minorities policy draws no distinction between tiny groups that can be exoticized through folklore and peoples such as Tibetans, Mongols and Uyghurs with long civilizational histories. The condition of the Uyghurs improved in the 1980s, but deteriorated rapidly thereafter. The ”freedoms” of socialist market economy have rendered minority citizens second-class and put them under extreme pressure to assimilate. We document these macro-level developments on the basis of rural field research in the oasis of Qumul/Hami between 2006 and 2013.

The molecular material in giant molecular gas clouds travels along intricate networks of filamentary gas lanes towards the congested centres of gas and dust where it is compressed into stars and planets. Astronomers have measured the motion of gas flowing from galaxy scales down to the dimensions of the gas clumps within which individual stars form. Their results show that the gas pervading each scale is dynamically interconnected: while star and planet formation occurs on the smallest dimensions, this process is controlled by a cascade of matter flows that begin on galactic scales.

When gas falls into a supermassive black hole, it liberates amounts of energy so vast as to be capable of ejecting much of a galaxy’s gaseous reservoir. Such black holes may thus cause the end of their own growth and that of their host galaxies. A new model developed at MPA now makes it possible to simulate winds accelerated by accreting black holes in galaxy evolution simulations in a physically accurate and validated way. By blowing dense gas from galactic nuclei, and by halting inward flows from the galactic halo, winds play a vital role in shaping the galaxy evolution.

By examining the Auriga suite of simulations, which model the formation of galaxies from soon after the Big Bang to the present day, scientists at MPA have been able to place constraints on the history of our galaxy. By comparing these simulations to observations of the Milky Way – specifically to the motions of stars in its inner regions — they concluded that our galaxy has been quite isolated in the last 12 billion years, only swallowing small galaxies with less than 5 % of its mass since then.