Press releases

Pressemitteilungen

20 years of MAGIC: The twin telescope on the island of La Palma (Photo: Chiara Righi/MAGIC Collaboration)

20 MAGIC years of gamma-ray astronomy at MPP

In 2003, a success story of astrophysics began on La Palma: 20 years ago in October, the first MAGIC telescope was inaugurated on the Canary Island, a huge instrument with a mirror diameter of 17 meters. Five years later, the twin MAGIC II telescope…

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CRESST detector module with H-shaped temperature sensor made of superconducting material (Photo: T. Dettlaff/MPP)

CRESST: Finetuning dark matter detectors

The CRESST experiment has specialized in the search for light dark matter particles, lighter than 1 Gigaelectronvolts (1 GeV). In order to reliably measure the tiny energy released by these particles in the detectors, those must be very precisely…

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Four different supernova simulations: Top left shows the reference model without neutrino flavor changes, the other three images show simulations with flavor changes after 100 milliseconds in different regions of the proto-neutron star, respectively. (Image: J. Ehring/MPP/MPA)

Supernova explosions: It's all in the flavor

Supernovae, stellar explosions of gigantic proportions, are powered by the lightest elementary particles of all: neutrinos. These come in three different varieties, which are called flavors. Until now, it was assumed that the neutrinos in a supernova…

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The infographic presents the chaos of all the different elementary particles - quarks and gluons – inside a proton. (Image: D. Dominguez/CERN)

A familiar particle - newly explored: insights into the inner life of the proton 

The proton is one of three building blocks of the atom. Thus protons, together with neutrons and electrons, form the matter we know. Since the 1960s, we have known that a proton consists of three quarks. However, researchers now have a much more…

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Aliens could use artificially created black holes as quantum computers (Image: Eduard Muzhevskyi/iStock)

Extraterrestrial Intelligence: quantum computing with black holes

Black holes as quantum computers? Sounds like science fiction, but it is a realistic scenario. No other system stores quantum information as efficiently as black holes. It is therefore conceivable that intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations could…

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