Café & Kosmos

Café & Kosmos - Talk with the scientists: The event series Café & Kosmos is engaged with current research questions "out of the universe," including the Big Bang, string theory, dark energy, dark matter, and many other topics.

These discussion rounds take place once per month, normally on a Tuesday evening at the Muffatwerk or at the Münchner Volkshochschule.

The organizers of Café & Kosmos are research institutions in Munich and Garching: the Excellence Cluster ORIGINS, the Max Planck Institute for Physics, the MPI for Astrophysics,  the MPI for Extraterrestrial Physics, and the SFB 1258 (Neutrinos, Dark Matter, Messengers) at the Technical University of Munich.

Image: CERN

70 years of CERN: Milestones in particle physics

Café & Kosmos am 24. September 2024

70 years ago, CERN was founded near Geneva in Switzerland. This was also the birth of an unprecedented research project: the planning and construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator with which researchers from all over the…

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Image: NASA/wikimedia commons

Science in zero gravity

Café & Kosmos on July 16, 2024

Without the force of gravity, many things behave very differently than we are used to: A burning candle, for example, is not a yellow flame in zero gravity, but a bluish ball. Soap bubbles turn out to be surprisingly thick-skinned, and grains form…

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Photomultipliers are installed in the COSINUS experiment to filter out unwanted background noise caused by cosmic rays (Photo: Astrid Eckert/MPP)

Dark matter: testing a controversial signal

Café & Kosmos on June 18, 2024

There are around 20 experiments worldwide searching for the mysterious dark matter. So far, none has been able to detect the substance - with one exception: the DAMA/LIBRA experiment has been claiming to measure a signal since 1998. However, no other…

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