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.

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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View of the Perseus cluster of galaxies (Image: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi)

Structure on large scales and the history of the universe

Café & Kosmos on 14 May, 2024

The large-scale distribution of galaxies contains important information about the initial conditions in the early universe and how the cosmos has evolved since then. In particular, they help to unravel the nature of the dark energy that is…

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The Bullet Cluster (Image: ESA)

Galaxy clusters - giants of the universe

Café & Kosmos on 23 April, 2024

The Bullet Cluster, one of the most interesting galaxy clusters we know, weighs several hundred thousand billion solar masses. This object alone gives us deep insights into the components of our universe: galaxies, hot gas and dark matter. We use…

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