Driven by the profound evidence from cosmology and astronomy the existence of dark matter is well-established as a part of our universe. Despite the fact, that there is five times more dark matter than baryonic matter out in the universe, its nature remains puzzling up to now. The promising idea...
The High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory (HAWC) collected more than a year of data in its full configuration. With its large field of view and high uptime it is exposed to two-thirds of the sky every day. From the light distribution in the arrays water-Cherenkov tanks we discriminate between electromagnetic and...
The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is a neutrino experiment under construction near Jiangmen, China. Its main component will be a spherical 20 kton liquid scintillator detector placed in a 700 m deep underground laboratory. The experiment is designed for the determination of the neutrino mass hierarchy by measuring oscillation...
H.E.S.S. (High Energy Stereoscopic System) is a hybrid array of five Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes observing the very high energy gamma-ray sky. In the past decade, this experiment has significantly contributed to the field of ground-based gamma-ray astronomy. In particular, the H.E.S.S. Galactic plane survey (HGPS), conducted from 2004 to...
Fast radio bursts are millisecond-duration radio beacons from a so-far unidentified class of extragalactic sources first discovered about a decade ago. Their inferred distances, and therefore radio burst energies, challenge models based on known source classes, while their inferred rates suggest they are fairly common. While most sources have so-far...
Atmospheric leptons receive steady interest from several scientific communities. At low and intermediate energies, atmospheric neutrinos are the signal for studies of fundamental neutrino properties and at high energies, they constitute the background for the characterization of the features of the astrophysical neutrino flux. We have studied in depth the...
The ECAP will participate in the "Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften" on October 21. For more information, see the corresponding website of the Department Physik: click here.
The Gaia Mission - Overview, First Results, and future prospects The astrometric satellite Gaia was launched in December 2019. After a comprehensive commissioning phase Gaia began its nominal scientific measurements in mid 2014. Gaia’s main goal is the determination of precise astrometric data for more than one billion stars in...
The Astrophysics of BH-BH/NS-NS Mergers with LIGO/Virgo I will discuss the astrophysical importance of the recent LIGO/Virgo direct detections of gravitational-waves. Despite majority of the expectations, it was not neutron star mergers being detected first, but the series of exotic massive black hole mergers. I will describe the leading theories...
The gravitational wave detection of a binary neutron star merger: expectations, surprises, and prospects On August 17, 2017, Advanced LIGO & Virgo detected gravitational waves from a binary neutron star merger. A short-duration gamma-ray burst was detected in temporal coincidence by the INTEGRAL and Fermi satellites. A few hours later,...