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The Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics is part of the
Max Planck Society The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science (; abbreviated MPG) is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institutes. Founded in 1911 as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, it was renamed to the M ...
, located in Garching, near
Munich Munich is the capital and most populous city of Bavaria, Germany. As of 30 November 2024, its population was 1,604,384, making it the third-largest city in Germany after Berlin and Hamburg. Munich is the largest city in Germany that is no ...
,
Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...
. In 1991 the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics split up into the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, the Max Planck Institute for Physics and the
Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics The Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA) is a research institute located in Garching, just north of Munich, Bavaria, Germany. It is one of many scientific research institutes belonging to the Max Planck Society. The MPA is widely consid ...
. The Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics was founded as sub-institute in 1963. The scientific activities of the institute are mostly devoted to astrophysics with telescopes orbiting in space. A large amount of the resources are spent for studying black holes in the Milky Way Galaxy and in the remote universe.


History

The Max-Planck-Institute for extraterrestrial physics (MPE) was preceded by the department for extraterrestrial physics in the Max-Planck-Institute for physics and astrophysics. This department was established by Professor Reimar Lüst on October 23, 1961. A Max-Planck Senate resolution transformed this department into a sub-institute of the Max-Planck-Institute for Physics and Astrophysics on May 15, 1963. Professor Lüst was appointed director of the institute. Another Senate resolution on March 8, 1991, finally established MPE as an autonomous institute within the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. It is dedicated to the experimental and theoretical exploration of the space outside of Earth as well as astrophysical phenomena.


Timeline

Major events in the history of the institute include: * 1963 Foundation as a sub-institute within the MPI für Physik und Astrophysik; director
Reimar Lüst Reimar Lüst (; 25 March 1923 – 31 March 2020) was a German astrophysicist. He worked in European space science from its beginning, as the scientific director of the European Space Research Organisation (ESRO) from 1962 and as Director Genera ...
* 1969 Klaus Pinkau becomes director at the institute (cosmic rays, gamma-astronomy) * 1972 Gerhard Haerendel becomes director at the institute (plasma physics) * 1975 Joachim Trümper becomes director and scientific member at the institute (X-ray astronomy) * 1981 The MPE X-ray test facility "Panter" located in Neuried starts operation * 1985 Gregor Morfill becomes director and scientific member at the institute (theory) * 1986 Reinhard Genzel becomes director and scientific member at the institute (infrared astronomy) * 1990 Joachim Trümper together with the MPI for Physics (MPP) founds the semiconductor laboratory as a joint project between the MPE and the MPP (since 2012 operated by the MPG) * 2000 R. Genzel together with the
University of California Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley ...
founds the "UCB-MPG Center for International Exchange in Astrophysics and Space Science" * 2000 G. Morfill together with the IPP founds the "Center for Interdisciplinary Plasma Science" (CIPS) (until 2004) * 2001 The "International Max-Planck- Research School on Astrophysics" (IMPRS) is opened by MPE, MPA, ESO, MPP and the universities of Munich * 2001 Günther Hasinger becomes scientific member and director at the institute (X-ray astronomy) * 2002 Ralf Bender becomes scientific member and director at the institute (optical and interpretative astronomy) * 2010 Kirpal Nandra becomes scientific member and director at the institute (high-energy astrophysics) * 2014 Paola Caselli becomes scientific member and director at the institute (Center for Astrochemical Studies) * 2020
Nobel Prize in Physics The Nobel Prize in Physics () is an annual award given by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for those who have made the most outstanding contributions to mankind in the field of physics. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the ...
for Reinhard Genzel for his research on the
black hole A black hole is a massive, compact astronomical object so dense that its gravity prevents anything from escaping, even light. Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass will form a black hole. Th ...
at the centre of the
Milky Way The Milky Way or Milky Way Galaxy is the galaxy that includes the Solar System, with the name describing the #Appearance, galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars in other arms of the galax ...
(
Sagittarius A* Sagittarius A*, abbreviated as Sgr A* ( ), is the supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center of the Milky Way. Viewed from Earth, it is located near the border of the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpius, about 5.6° south o ...
) * 2023 Frank Eisenhauer becomes scientific member and director at the institute (infrared-/submillimeter astronomy)


Detailed history

The Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) was preceded by the department for extraterrestrial Physics in the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics. This department was established by Professor Reimar Lüst on October 23, 1961. A Max-Planck Senate resolution transformed this department into a sub-institute of the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics on May 15, 1963. Professor Lüst was appointed director of the institute. Another Senate resolution on March 8, 1991, finally established MPE as an autonomous institute within the Max Planck Society. It is dedicated to the experimental and theoretical exploration of the space outside of Earth as well as astrophysical phenomena. A continuous reorientation to new, promising fields of research and the appointment of new members ensures steady advancement. Among the 29 employees of the Institute when it was founded in 1963 were 9 scientists and 1 Ph.D. student. Twelve years later in 1975 the number of employees had grown to 180 with 55 scientists and 13 Ph.D. students, and today (status 2015) there are some 400 staff (130 scientists and 75 PhD students). It is noteworthy that permanent positions at the institute have not increased since 1973 - despite its celebrated scientific achievements. The increasingly complex tasks and international obligations have been mainly maintained by staff members with positions having limited duration and funded by external organizations. Because the institute has assumed a leading position in astronomy internationally, it has attracted guest scientists throughout the world. The number of long-term guests increased from 12 in 1974 to a maximum of 72 in 2000. In recent years MPE has hosted an average of about 50 guest scientists each year. During the early years, the scientific work at the Institute concentrated on the investigation of extraterrestrial plasmas and the magnetosphere of the Earth. This work was performed with measurements of particles and electromagnetic fields as well as a specially developed ion-cloud technique using sounding rockets. Another field of research also became important: astrophysical observations of electromagnetic radiation which could not be observed from the surface of the Earth because the wavelengths are such that the radiation is absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere. These observations and inferences therefrom are the subject matter of infra-red astronomy as well as X-ray- and gamma-ray-astronomy. In addition to more than 100 rockets, an increasing number of high-altitude balloons (up to now more than 50; e.g. HEXE) have been used to carry experiments to high altitudes. Since the 1990s, satellites have become the preferred observation platforms because of their favorable observation-time/cost ratio. Nevertheless, high-flying observation airplanes and ground-based telescopes are also used to obtain data, especially for optical and near-infrared observations. New observation techniques using satellites has necessitated the recording, processing and accessible storage of high data fluxes over long periods of time. This demanding task is performed by a data processing group, which has grown quickly in the last decade. Special data centers were established for the large satellite projects. Besides the many successes, there have also been disappointments. The malfunctioning of the Ariane carrier rockets on test launches in 1980 and 1996 were particularly bitter setbacks. The satellite FIREWHEE

in which many members of the Institute had invested years of work, was lost on May 23, 1980, because of a burning instability in the first stage of the launch rocket. The same fate was to overtake the four satellites of the Cluster (spacecraft), Cluster mission on June 4, 1996, when the first
Ariane 5 Ariane 5 is a retired European heavy-lift space launch vehicle operated by Arianespace for the European Space Agency (ESA). It was launched from the Guiana Space Centre (CSG) in French Guiana. It was used to deliver payloads into geostationar ...
was launched. This time the disaster was attributed to an error in the rocket's software. The most recent loss was ABRIXAS, an X-ray satellite built by industry under the leadership of MPE. After few hours in orbit, a malfunction of the power system caused the total loss of the satellite. Over the years, however, the history of MPE is primarily a story of scientific successes.


Selected achievements

* Exploration of the Ionosphere and Magnetosphere by means of ion clouds (1963–1985) * The first map of the galactic gamma-ray emission ( > 70 MeV) as measured with the satellite COS-B (1978) * Measurement of the magnetic field of the neutron star Her-X1 using the cyclotron line emission (balloon experiments 1978) * Experimental proof of the reconnection process (1979) * The artificial comet (AMPTE 1984/85) * Numerical simulation of a collision-free shock wave (1990) * The first map of the X-ray sky as measured with the imaging X-ray telescope on board the ROSAT satellite (1993) * First gamma-ray sky map in the energy range 3 to 10 MeV as measured with the imaging Compton telescope COMPTEL on board CGRO (1994) * The plasma-crystal experiment and its successors on the International Space Station (1996–2013) * The measurement of the element- and isotope-composition of the solar wind by the CELIAS experiment on board the SOHO satellite (1996) * The first detection of water-molecule lines in an expanding shell of a star using the Fabry-Perot spectrometer on board the ISO satellite (1996) * First detection of X-ray emission from comets and planets (1996, 2001) * Determining the energy source for ultraluminous infrared galaxies with the satellite ISO (1998) * Detection of gamma-ray line emission (44Ti) from supernova remnants (1998) * Deep observations of the extragalactic X-ray sky with ROSAT, XMM-Newton and Chandra and resolving the background radiation into individual sources (since 1998) * Confirmation that a supermassive black hole resides at the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy (2002) * Detection of a binary active galactic nucleus in X-rays (2003) * Reconstruction of the evolution history of stars in elliptical galaxies (2005) * Stellar disks rotating around the black hole in the Andromeda galaxy (2005) * Determining the gas content of normal galaxies in the early universe (since 2010) * Resolving the cosmic infrared background into individual galaxies with Herschel (2011)


Scientific work

The institute was founded in 1963 as a sub-institute of the Max-Planck-Institut für Physik und Astrophysik and established as an independent institute in 1991. Its main research topics are astronomical observations in spectral regions which are only accessible from space because of the absorbing effects of the Earth's atmosphere, but also instruments on ground-based observatories are used whenever possible. Scientific work is done in four major research areas that are supervised by one of the directors, respectively: optical and interpretative astronomy (Bender), infrared and sub-millimeter/millimeter astronomy (Genzel), high-energy astrophysics (Nandra), and in the Centre for Astrochemical Studies (Caselli). Within these areas scientists lead individual experiments and research projects organised in about 25 project teams. The research topics pursued at MPE range from the physics of cosmic plasmas and of stars to the physics and chemistry of interstellar matter, from star formation and nucleosynthesis to extragalactic astrophysics and cosmology. Many experiments of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) have to be carried out above the dense Earth's atmosphere using aircraft, rockets, satellites and space probes. In the early days experiments were also flown on balloons. To run advanced extraterrestrial physics and state-of-the-art experimental astrophysics, the institute continues to develop high-tech instrumentation in-house. This includes detectors, spectrometers, and cameras as well as telescopes and complete payloads (e.g. ROSAT and eROSITA) and even entire satellites (as in case of AMPTE and EQUATOR-S). For this purpose the technical and engineering departments are of particular importance for the institute's research work. Observers and experimenters perform their research work at the institute in close contact with each other. Their interaction while interpreting observations and propounding new hypotheses underlies the successful progress of the institute's research projects. At the end of the year 2022 a total of 508 employees were working at the institute, numbering among them about 100 scientists, 60 junior scientists, 10 apprentices and 140 visiting researchers.


Projects

Scientific projects at the MPE are often the efforts of the different research departments to build, maintain, and use experiments and facilities which are needed by the many different scientific research interest at the institute. Apart from hardware projects, there are also projects that use archival data and are not necessarily connected to a new instrument. A brief overview of the most recent projects. * For the EUCLID space telescope, which has been launched in July 2023 and from which researchers hope to gain new insights into
dark matter In astronomy, dark matter is an invisible and hypothetical form of matter that does not interact with light or other electromagnetic radiation. Dark matter is implied by gravity, gravitational effects that cannot be explained by general relat ...
and
dark energy In physical cosmology and astronomy, dark energy is a proposed form of energy that affects the universe on the largest scales. Its primary effect is to drive the accelerating expansion of the universe. It also slows the rate of structure format ...
, the institute contributed the NISP optical system. * The GRAVITY instrument enables the four 8-metre telescopes at the
Very Large Telescope The Very Large Telescope (VLT) is an astronomical facility operated since 1998 by the European Southern Observatory, located on Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. It consists of four individual telescopes, each equipped with ...
(VLT) in Chile to be interconnected by means of interferometry to form a virtual telescope with a diameter of 130 metres. The follow-up project GRAVITY Plus is currently being developed, which is expected to achieve an even sharper resolution thanks to a new system of
adaptive optics Adaptive optics (AO) is a technique of precisely deforming a mirror in order to compensate for light distortion. It is used in Astronomy, astronomical telescopes and laser communication systems to remove the effects of Astronomical seeing, atmo ...
,
laser guide star A laser guide star is an artificial star image created for use in astronomical adaptive optics systems, which are employed in large telescopes in order to correct atmospheric distortion of light (called '' astronomical seeing''). Adaptive optics ...
s and an extended field of view. * For the 39-metre European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), which is currently being built in the Chilean Atacama Desert and is planned to be finished by 2027, MPE is developing the first-light instrument MICADO (Multi-AO Imaging Camera for Deep Observations). * The ERIS (Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph) infrared camera will replace the NACO and SINFONI instruments at the VLT. * With eROSITA (extended ROentgen Survey with an Imaging Telescope Array), the main instrument of the Russian X-ray gamma-ray satellite Spektr-RG launched from
Baikonur Baikonur ( ; ) is a city in Kazakhstan on the northern bank of the Syr Darya river. It is currently leased and administered by the Russian Federation as an enclave until 2050. It was constructed to serve the Baikonur Cosmodrome with adminis ...
in July 2019, the first complete sky survey in the X-ray range was achieved.


External links

* http://www.mpe.mpg.de * https://web.archive.org/web/20120609132517/http://www.mpia.de/Public/menu-e.php * http://www.nasa.gov/ * http://www.esa.int/esaCP/index.html


References

{{Authority control Extraterrestrial Physics Education in Munich Astronomy institutes and departments Physics research institutes Garching bei München