More good news: I got recognized by the jury of the new “SUPERvisor Award” of the University of Potsdam and its Potsdam Graduate School (PoGS). The award honors excellent doctoral supervision and recognizes special commitment and outstanding achievements in the guidance and support of doctoral candidates. The most important prize was learning that my fantastic research team appreciates our work and group environment so much that they decided to nominate me. Still, it was a good excuse to head out and celebrate these great people with great coffee and cake.

Great news: my Cosmic Choreographies research group was selected for the “Best Research Environment Award” by Die Junge Akademie  and the Volkswagen Stiftung. In their email they write:

Your application convinced the jury with its commitment and innovative structures to promote a good research environment. It is therefore one of this year’s outstanding submissions.

In total 24 environments were chosen, out of over 270 submitted applications. Unfortunately, luck wasn’t on our side when the ten environments receiving a grant were drawn at random, but having our small research group selected as one of the best research environments – along with whole departments – over all disciplines is worth celebrating.

What I especially like is that it’s an award for the group, not individuals. Which is much more representative of what science in general and astronomy in particular is actually like.

Exciting news: today we have a new paper out in Nature Astronomy, titled “Andromeda’s asymmetric satellite system as a challenge to cold dark matter cosmology”. It is led by Kosuke Jamie Kanehisa, a PhD student in my group, and we worked on it together with our AIP colleague Noam Libeskind.

Our study looks at the system of satellite galaxies around the Andromeda galaxy. The observed satellite galaxies are distributed in a highly asymmetric, lopsided manner towards the Milky Way. We test for the first time whether such a weird arrangement also happens for analogs to Andromeda in cosmological simulations and find that the observed system is in fact highly unexpected. This is on top of the existence of a plane of satellite galaxies around Andromeda, which in itself already challenged the cold dark matter standard model of cosmology.

In addition to the article itself, we also wrote a research briefing for Nature Astronomy, and have prepared a press release on the topic. Jamie even created a nice illustrative animation of the Andromeda Satellite galaxy system and its peculiar arrangement for this purpose.

Today my German popular science book “Von Tanzenden Galaxien, Dunkler Materie und anderen kosmischen Rätseln” (ISBN: 978-3-95972-788-4, Of Dancing Galaxies, Dark Matter and Other Cosmic Riddles) was published!

On 304 pages I write about astronomy, galaxies, and how astrophysicists deal with challenges to the dark matter model. In doing so, I cover everything from astronomical fundamentals and historical developments to our very latest research. From cosmological simulations, over alternative types of dark matter, to the modification of the laws of gravity.

It was important to me that the book does not require any special prior knowledge or even astronomy expertise, but is generally understandable. To this end, I have illustrated the content with many creative analogies.

The book has already been spotted in the first bookshops and can of course also be ordered online everywhere. I hope you enjoy reading it and look forward to hearing your impressions.

Two new (German-language) videos appeared last week that feature me talking about … science, what else?

The first is a recording of my presentation at a training event for high school teachers, about dwarf galaxies and dark matter. It already got 40k views in just a week!

The other video is more personal: an interview about my motivation to be a researcher, my career with highlights and challenges, and some advice for those interested in becoming scientists.

ENGLISH: The pre-publication version of my invited article “Fordern galaktische Zwerge die Kosmologie heraus” (“Do galactic dwarfs challenge cosmology”) has been published online now. It will appear in print in early 2024 in the German magazine “Physik in unserer Zeit” (Physics in our times), which targets an audience with broader physics (e.g. physicists, engineers, teachers) in contrast to a specialist audience. So it is a good opportunity for all those interested in learning a bit more about my research without having to go through primary research articles of reviews. The article is open access, too!

GERMAN: Die Vorabversion meines eingeladenen Artikels “Fordern galaktische Zwerge die Kosmologie heraus” ist jetzt online veröffentlicht worden. Er wird in gedruckter Form Anfang 2024 in der Zeitschrift “Physik in unserer Zeit” erscheinen, die sich nicht an ein Fachpublikum, sondern an ein breiteres Publikum mit Physik-Vorbildung richtet (z.B. Physiker, Ingenieure, Lehrer). Der Text ist also eine gute Gelegenheit für alle, die etwas mehr über meine Forschung erfahren möchten, ohne sich durch primäre Forschungsartikel oder Reviews arbeiten zu müssen. Der Artikel ist außerdem frei zugänglich!