Projects

Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays are the most energetic known messengers of the universe and can be used for testing the frontiers of physics. In particular, they are a powerful tool for searching for imprints of Lorentz invariance violation (LIV). ECAP scientist Dr. Rodrigo Guedes Lang has recently pu...

The Dr. Karl Remeis Observatory in Bamberg, which forms ECAP's astronomy research group, hosts a large collection of historical photographic plates. The lengthy digitization process of those is now finished, which finally allows astronomers to harness their contained research potential at large.

Novae are powerful eruptions on the surface of a white dwarf in a binary star system, in which a larger star and a smaller star orbit each other. A nova creates a shock wave that tears through the surrounding medium, pulling particles with it and accelerating them to extreme energies. Dr. Alison Mit...

The German eROSITA consortium, including researchers from FAU, has released the first set of data taken by the eROSITA X-ray telescope, which can scan the entire sky in the X-ray range. Researchers across the globe can now access data from the telescope. The early data release (EDR) is accompanied b...

The analysis of observational data in gamma-ray astronomy requires specialised analysis methods and software to reach the highest possible sensitivity in the presence of the background ’noise’ of charged cosmic rays. Traditionally both the data and corresponding analysis software belonged to the col...

The nature of dark matter, the substance that accounts for more than 85% of all matter in the Universe, remains a mystery. Many theories predict that dark matter is made up from yet undiscovered fundamental particles and a plethora of experiments on Earth and in Space are looking for traces of them....

After a decade-long search, scientists have for the first time detected a gamma-ray burst in very- high-energy gamma light. This discovery was made in July 2018 by the H.E.S.S. collaboration using the huge 28-m telescope of the H.E.S.S. array in Namibia and reported in the journal 'Nature' on Nov. 2...

The H.E.S.S. telescopes have surveyed the Milky Way in gamma-ray light for the last 15 years. To celebrate this anniversary, the H.E.S.S. collaboration has published its largest set of science results to date in a series of papers in a special issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. The m...

In presence of FAU President Joachim Hornegger, State Secretary Stefan Müller of the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) visited ECAP today to officially handover funding certificates worth over 2 million Euros. During the next three years, scientists from ECAP who are involved in the c...

On August 17, 2017, the gravitational wave interferometers Advanced Ligo and Advanced Virgo recorded a signal from the merger of a binary neutron star system, a type of signal that had never been seen before. Complementing this exciting discovery, dozens of telescopes worldwide observed the sky,...