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Café & Kosmos

Café & Kosmos - Talk with the scientists: The event series Café & Kosmos is engaged with current research questions "out of the universe," including the Big Bang, string theory, dark energy, dark matter, and many other topics.

These discussion rounds take place once per month, normally on a Tuesday evening at the Muffatwerk.

The organizers of Café & Kosmos are research institutions in Munich and Garching: the Excellence Cluster ORIGINS, the Max Planck Institute for Physics, the MPI for Astrophysics,  the MPI for Extraterrestrial Physics, and the SFB 1258 (Neutrinos, Dark Matter, Messengers) at the Technical University of Munich.

The sun with sunspots (Image: NASA/SDO)

Weather report from space: auroras and power outages

Café & Kosmos on 30 January, 2024

The surface of the sun is like a bubbling cauldron of hot plasma. Sunspots - darker and cooler areas than the rest of the surface - come and go. Huge plasma magnetic field arcs form near them. Occasionally, magnetic short circuits hurl huge streams…

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Our galaxy, the Milky Way (Image: H. Dahle/ESO)

What neutrinos tell us about the Milky Way

Café & Kosmos on 13 November, 2023

For more than 100 years, scientists have puzzled over the source of the high-energy cosmic rays that continuously pelt our Earth's atmosphere. Neutrinos are the only particles in the radiation that allow direct conclusions to be drawn about its…

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The CRESST experiment in the Gran Sasso Underground Lab (Photo: CRESST Collaboration)

Cold, Colder, CRESST: The Search for Dark Matter

Café & Kosmos on October 21, 2023

For decades, we have known of the existence of matter. This "dark" matter is five times more abundant than ordinary matter and plays a crucial role in the evolution of the universe. However, we have not yet been able to identify the nature of this…

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