FRANKFURT. Even after the direct measurement of their gravitational waves, there are still mysteries surrounding black holes. What happens when two black holes merge, or when stars collide with a black hole? This has now been simulated by researchers from Goethe University Frankfurt and the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS) using a novel numerical method. The simulation code "ExaHyPE" is designed in such a way that it will be able to calculate gravitational waves on the future generation of “exascale” supercomputers.

Korbach: From 25 May to 3 June 2018, scientists from the FIAS* and the research projects of the State Initiative for the Development of Scientific and Economic Excellence (LOEWE)** will once again be invited to experiment, be amazed and discuss at the "Hessen schafft Wissen" stand.

On 2 and 3 May 2018, the FIAS hosted the kick-off meeting of the DFG priority programme "SPP 2041 - Computational Connectomics". The goal of SPP 2041 is to better understand the interconnection and function of our brain and nervous system. Under the term "computational connectomics", the scientists involved use computer science and mathematics methods to better understand the structure of the connections between individual nerve cells or entire brain regions.

The "Hessenschau" reported on the work of our director Volker Lindenstruth and our Fellow Hans-Jügen Lüdde in its programme of 8 April.

Born in 1927, the former General Director of Nestlé and holder of the Federal Cross of Merit, he has been committed for years to science and FIAS in particular. Since the founding days of FIAS, he has been a member of the Presidium of the Board of Trustees and was its first chairman. Helmut Maucher has accompanied and shaped the development of our institute with prudence and an eye for the essentials.

"What came after the Big Bang is still a big question. We don't know exactly what happened there. But we know that the universe was probably filled with a quark-gluon plasma millions of seconds after the Big Bang. The big difference to today's universe was that it was extremely hot and extremely dense," FIAS Fellow Hannah Petersen explains in the podcast of Welt der Physik.

The present study is a proof of principle study where Long-Gang Pang, Kai Zhou, Nan Su, Hannah Petersen, Horst Stöcker and Xin-Nian Wang (University of California in Berkeley, USA) used more than 20.000 pictures from relativistic hydrodynamic simulations of heavy ion collisions in a convolution neural network (CNN) to classify two regions in the phase diagram.

FRANKFURT. Since their discovery in the 60's, scientists have worked on answering a crucial question: How massive do neutron stars actually get? Differently from black holes, in fact, these stars cannot be arbitrarily massive; past a certain finite limit in mass, no physical force in nature can contrast their enormous gravitational forces. For the first time, astrophysicists at Goethe University Frankfurt have succeeded in calculating a stringent upper bound on the maximum mass of neutron stars.

The Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS)'s project "hands-on science" was awarded second place in the 2017 Award of the Anneliese and Heinz Frisch Foundation on Thursday, 16 November 2017.

Prof. Luciano Rezzolla, Senior Fellow of the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS) and Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics at the Goethe University, will receive 80 million CPU hours at the supercomputer superMUC of the Leibniz Computing Center in Garching near Munich next year for the simulation of neutron star duplex systems.

This Wednesday we will have an award ceremony in honour of our new FIAS Senior Fellow Laureate Prof. Dr. Dr. Hartmut Michel, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry 1988 and director at the Max-Planck-Institut für Biophysik. The ceremony will be held on Wednesday, October 18 at 17.30. After the Ceremony, Prof. Michel will give a small talk about his work (about 30 minutes in german language, abstract below). All FIAS-Members and interested Friends are warmly invited to join the ceremony and following reception.

The "Gießener Anzeiger" talks with FIAS Fellow Klemens Zink and his collaborator about their research.

Researchers from the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, the Max-Planck-Institute for Brain Research and the Ernst-Strüngmann Institute for Neuroscience have studied why such differences between these animal species exist using two different computer models. Unexpectedly, the researchers found that the existence of this ordered structure is not only determined by the connectivity in the circuit, but also by the total number of neurons. Their findings were recently published in the scientific journal PNAS [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences].