Kosmisches Kino: Woran erkennt man kollidierende Giganten?

In the organizer's words:

Before the end of the year, you can look forward to a special highlight in the ESO Supernova with our "Cosmic Cinema" event series. On December 12, Dr. Ludwig Böss will show the spectacular dance of galaxy clusters through their gravity and the possibilities that such computer models offer for astronomy on the planetarium's cupola.

If you go for a walk on a cold December night with a clear sky, you might be able to discover our home galaxy, the Milky Way. A band of stars stretching out above us. Our galaxy is a collection of 200 billion stars and belongs to a group of galaxies that lie in a vast, empty region. Viewed on a large scale, our universe resembles a gigantic cosmic web, a network of galaxies and voids. At its nodes, a particularly large number of galaxies gather in clusters, attract each other through their gravity, dance around each other and collide. In the process, shock waves of heated gas spread through intergalactic space. 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 of this. However, computer simulations make it possible to calculate the chronological sequence of these developments and thus help to breathe life into the still images and understand the cosmic movements.

In Cosmic Cinema, Ludwig Böss from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) takes us away from the cold winter nights and into the hot atmospheres of these cosmic giants.

Book a ticket now and watch galaxies dance on the dome of the planetarium. Watch colliding galaxies and see how the afterglow forms spectacular, arching structures at the edges of galaxy clusters.

Cosmic Cinema is a series of events organized by the Cluster of Excellence ORIGINS in cooperation with ESO Supernova. The event starts on December 12, 2024 at 19:00, but the ESO Supernova exhibition is already open from 18:30.

Information about the Cosmic Cinema in January can be found here.