Lecture series in the planetarium at the Garching research campus
Kosmisches Kino: How do you recognise colliding giants?
Event location
Campus Garching
Public event
Presenter
Dr. Ludwig Böss
When you walk around on a cold December night with clear sky, you can see our home galaxy, the Milky Way. A band of stars stretching above you. Our galaxy is a collection of 200 billion stars and belongs to a group of galaxies that lies in a huge, empty region of the universe. It is just a small part of the cosmic web, a large network of galaxies and voids.
At the nodes of this web, particularly large numbers of galaxies accumulate in clusters, attracting each other through their gravity, and dance around each other and collide. In the process, shock waves of heated gas spread through intergalactic space. They can be observed in the frequency range of radio waves.
The dance of galaxies and the propagation of shock waves are processes that take many billions of years. When we look into the depths of space with telescopes, we only see snapshots. However, computer simulations make it possible to calculate and visualise their motion in time. They are breathing life into the still images and help us understand the cosmic movements.
In this Kosmisches Kino, Ludwig Böss from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) will guide us away from the cold winter nights and through the hot atmospheres of these cosmic giants
This event will be in German.
Additional information
How to find us
- Location: Planetarium of the ESO Supernova, Karl-Schwarzschild-Str. 2, 85748 Garching
- GPS coordinates: 48° 15' 36.90" N; 11° 40' 15.16" E
The ESO Supernova Planetarium & Visitor Center is located 2 km northeast of Garching and 15 km northeast of Munich on the grounds of the research center.