Orion Nebula, Pleiades and Hyades: The latest research results indicate that these famous star clusters represent the different phases of life of one and the same star system. A team of astrophysicists at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences in Zanjan, Iran, and the University of Bonn have found evidence that these three star systems are not just located in roughly the same region of space but also developed in the same way. These results were recently published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.”

Beamline for Schools (BL4S) is a physics competition that was initiated by CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, and is open to secondary school pupils from all around the world. Participants are invited to submit a proposal for a physics experiment to be undertaken at the beamline of a particle accelerator, either at CERN or at one of the partner institutes: DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron in Hamburg, Germany) and ELSA (Elektronen-Stretcher-Anlage of the University of Bonn, Germany). In 2025, a record number of five winning teams have been chosen, based on both the scientific merit of their proposals and the communication merit of their submission video.

On the second of June we had the Career talk of the summer semester 2025. We were visited by Dr. Jolanta Zjupa of the FZJ (Research Center Juelich) who is part of the JSC (Juelich Supercomputing Center). Read more for a brief summary of her visit and the topics discussed in the consecutive informal meeting.

The Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Bonn will be represented in three Clusters of Excellence in the future - an impressive success that underlines the breadth and international visibility of its research. The University of Bonn was successful with a total of eight approved clusters in the nationwide Excellence Strategy and is therefore once again one of the absolute leaders in the German science system.

The “afterglow” of the universe is an important piece of evidence for the Big Bang. This background radiation also provides important answers to the question of how the first galaxies were able to form. Researchers at the Universities of Bonn, Prague and Nanjing calculate that the strength of this radiation has probably been overestimated up to now. If the results prove to be accurate, it would call into question the theoretical foundation of the standard model of cosmology. The results have now been published in the journal “Nuclear Physics B.”

Technology is being pushed to its very limits. The upgrades to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN slated for the next few years will increase data transfer rates beyond what the current neutrino detector for the FASER experiment can cope with, requiring it to be replaced by a new kind of more powerful detector. This is a task that physicist Professor Matthias Schott from the University of Bonn will be tackling with the help of €1 million in Reinhart Koselleck funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Applications only possible until May 15! The "Stiftung für Physik und Astronomie" in Bonn honors academic performance and commitment in the study of physics (teaching degree and major subject) and astrophysics with the Jasbinsek Kunkelmann-Stipendium  for the Master's program (one-year scholarship of € 300 per month). The scholarship is granted from 01.10.2025 to 30.09.2026.

At the International Masterclasses ‘Hands on Particle Physics’ at the University of Bonn on 11 March (Belle II), 25 March (ATLAS) and 11 April (LHCb) 2025, around 60 students got to know particle physics up close and became researchers themselves for a day.