Max Planck Institutes and Experts

One of the most remarkable capacities of human beings is their ability to work together, to solve problems or to create things that no individual could have solved or created on its own. In current studies, researchers look at the early ontogeny of children’s abilities for collaboration and provide evidence that young children have species-unique skills and motivations of shared intentionality, including skills such as forming joint goals and joint attention with others, along with cooperative motives for helping others and sharing with others.

After the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998 in West Sumatra the political freedom led to a threefold and contradictory revitalisation process of legal, political and ideological principles of social order: democratic principles, the role of Islam in public space, and a wider recognition of tradition (adat) based rights in the local government and natural resource management. This has led to discussions over the „true“ Minangkabau ethnic identity and culture that is a struggle over the new balance between the co-existing legal orders of state law, Islamic law and adat law.

Spiral galaxies grow by swallowing smaller dwarf galaxies. As they are digested, these dwarf galaxies are severely distorted, forming structures such as surreal tendrils and stellar streams that surround their captors. Now, for the first time, a new survey has detected such tell-tale structures in galaxies more distant than our immediate galactic neighbourhood. This opens up the possibility of testing our current views of galaxy evolution in a new way.

Measurements were made of the velocities of a large number of stars in a young galactic cluster, whose age is only about one million years. The cluster is embedded in the bright emission nebula NGC 3603. It is one of the most massive objects of its kind within the Milky Way. To determine the individual stellar velocities, the astronomers compared the positions of the stars on two images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope ten years apart. From this comparison the motion of hundreds of stars could be determined, showing that the cluster stars have not yet reached a dynamically configuration.

Astronomers have so far found more than five hundred "exoplanets", i. e. planets orbiting other stars. A group of these are large planets with orbits very close to their host stars, the so-called "hot Jupiters". Their mass is similar to our Jupiter but they are often much bigger, indicating that their interior is much hotter. Left to themselves, they should cool down and deflate fairly rapidly to a size similar to the Jupiter in our solar system.