The second data release of the international project CALIFA - a survey of galaxies carried out at Calar Alto observatory – will take place today. Galaxies are the result of an evolutionary process started thousands of million years ago, and their history is coded in their distinct components. The CALIFA project is intended to decode the galaxies’ history in a sort of galactic archaeology, through the 3D observations of a sample of six hundred galaxies. With this second data release corresponding to two hundred galaxies, the project reaches its halfway point with important results behind.

Prof. Dr. Matthias Steinmetz, scientific chairman of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP), is the new President of the German Astronomical Society (Astronomische Gesellschaft, AG).

Davor Krajnović, astronomer at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP), and his colleagues Eric Emsellem (ESO) and Marc Sarzi (University of Hertfordshire), have discovered how giant elliptical galaxies move.

Magnetic fields on the solar surface come in many shapes and sizes. The smallest magnetic flux elements become visible in the Fraunhofer G-band, a narrow spectral region with many molecular lines at around 430.6 nm, as bright points – sometimes aligned in chains and arcs.

The AIP welcomes this years Karl Schwarzschild Fellow Else Starkenburg.

Using data from the RAVE survey, a large observation project initiated and led by the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP), an international team of astronomers has produced new maps of the material between the stars in the Milky Way that should move astronomers closer to cracking a stardust puzzle that has vexed them for nearly a century.

The Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) hosts its 11th Thinkshop under the title "Satellite galaxies and dwarfs in the local group“. From August 25 to 29 over 130 scientists will get together on the Potsdam Telegrafenberg to discuss their research in the field of cosmology.

Building on 14 years of extraordinary discoveries, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has launched a major program of three new surveys, adding novel capabilities to expand its census of the Universe into regions it had been unable to explore before.

Today Prof. R. Brent Tully from the Institute for Astronomy Honolulu, Hawaii receives the Wempe Award in recognition of his groundbreaking research about the structure of galaxies and the large-scale structure of the cosmos.

The CosmoSim database (www.cosmosim.org) has now been released after an intensive testing period. This service to the scientific community is the successor of the MultiDark database (www.multidark.org) and it is used as a platform for publishing and sharing data products from cosmological simulations.

Using ESA’s X-ray telescope XMM-Newton a team of Potsdam astronomers together with collegues from Belgium and the USA have found X-ray pulsations of a unique star. It is a celestial wonder with a body of a normal star but with the magnetic field much stronger than normal. The race is now on to understand why it behaves in this way.

For Girls'Day / Future Day Brandenburg, the AIP invited a good twenty girls from Brandenburg and Berlin to take a look at the world of astrophysics.

Noam Libeskind, scientist of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP), explains in an article in the latest issue of “Scientific American”, why dwarf galaxies (also called “satellite galaxies”) are arranged on a plane instead of being scattered randomly. Superhighways of Dark Matter might be the solution to this astronomic puzzle.

A team of scientists headed by Ivan Minchev from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) has found a way to reconstruct the evolutionary history of our galaxy, the Milky Way, to a new level of detail.

The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften - BBAW) has elected Matthias Steinmetz, Director of the Leibniz Institute Potsdam (AIP), as a full member of the Academy. To be appointed, scientists must distinguish themselves through outstanding scientific achievements.

Two high performance instruments from Potsdam-Babelsberg arrived at the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) in Arizona, the largest reflector telescope in the world. The so-called PFUs (Permanent Fibre Units) provide both telescope control and the transmission of starlight collected via the telescope mirror to the spectrograph PEPSI (“Potsdam Echelle Polarimetric and Spectroscopic Instrument”).

For successfully bridging the gap between astronomy as a hobby and the world of science, Axel Schwope of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam has been acknowledged.

Astronomers have discovered that our Galaxy wobbles. An international team of astronomers around Mary Williams from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) detected and examined this phenomenon with the RAdial Velocity Experiment (RAVE), a survey of almost half a million stars around the Sun. In addition to the regular Galactic rotation the scientists found the Milky Way moving perpendicular to the Galactic plane.

Physicians and astrophysicists work on a new diagnostic method.