German observatories host a heritage of astronomical observations stored on historical photographic plates that show the starry sky (see Fig. 1). Together with the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam and the Universities of Hamburg and Tartu (Estonia), scientists at the Dr. Remeis-Sternwarte ...
Our PhD-student Caroline Collischon published a paper titled “Tracking down the origin of superbubbles and supergiant shells in the Magellanic Clouds with Minkowski tensor analysis”. In collaboration with Prof. Dr. Klaus Mecke of the Institute of Theoretical Physics, an automatic bubble-...
Supernovae type Ia are very important standard candles for distances in the universe, as they are very bright. Since the mechanism will produce an explosion of a certain luminosity the brightness of the event observed from earth will immediately give a glimpse at the distance of the supernova. In or...
Nearly two years after launch, the eROSITA consortium, in which the observatory is heavily involved, will have its first data release. This release, called early data release (EDR), will include the calibration and science verification observations. These observations were carried out between Septem...
The large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is the largest satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The LMC is home to many interesting objects such as SN1987A or the nebula 30 Doradus. Also known as the Tarantula nebula, 30 Doradus is an emission nebula and one of the largest and most active...
The first black hole ever discovered in our Galaxy is part of the high-mass X-ray binary Cygnus X-1. This system consist of two components, the blue giant star HD 226868 and a black hole. Previously, the distance was thought to be around 6100 lightyears, which indicated that the black hole...
The first all-sky survey by the eROSITA X-ray telescope revealed the entire X-ray Universe with unprecedented detail in June 2020. The study of one particularly interesting feature, the large-scale “eROSITA bubbles” in the halo of the Milky Way, has now been published in Nature. What has...
Javier García, who has been a Humboldt Fellow at our observatory since 2017, has been awarded the ‘2021 Early Career Award’ by the American Astronomical Society. His main focus is to understand the X-ray radiation around accreting compact objects, such as black holes and neutron stars. W...
Binary stars are well known to astrophysicists. One stellar double-act in particular has drawn their attention, as part of the X-ray radiation that binary star systems usually emit is missing, and the x-rays it did emit seemed to have strange properties. A research team led by FAU observed a binary....
The eROSITA telescope has finished its first sweep across the sky and presents us the deepest image of the X-ray that humanity has ever seen. This map is about 4 times deeper than what has been seen by the ROSAT all-sky survey 30 years ago and contains over 1 million hot objects,...
