Detailed Conference Program

(Time zone: Europe/Berlin, CEST/UTC+2)


Tuesday, 08. September 2026

09:00-10:30 Award Ceremony and Schwarzschild Lecture (MW-1801 / virtual plenum)

09:00  Opening

09:15  Karl Schwarzschild Lecture - Marta Volonteri:
TBD

10:00  Ludwig Biermann Award Talk - Caroline Gieser:
TBD

10:30-11:00 Coffee Break

11:00-12:15 Plenary Talks (Awardees) (MW-1801 / virtual plenum)

11:00  Astrophysical Software Award Talk - Cornelis P. Dullemond:
TBD

11:30  Maximilian Häberle:
oMEGACat and the intermediate-mass black hole in Omega Centauri

12:00  Awards:
Bruno H. Bürgel Prize: Florian Freistetter
Hans-Ludwig-Neumann Prize: Klaus Hünig
Jugend-forscht Award: Alexander Leukert and Leon Heinisch

12:15-12:30 Conference Photo

12:30-14:00 Lunch Break

14:00-15:30 Splinter Sessions (in parallel)

NonThermalAccel - Cosmic Accelerators and the Non-Thermal Universe: From Black Holes to Galaxies and the Cosmic Web (MW-1250)

14:05  Artem Bohdan:
The Kinetic Heart of Cosmic Accelerators

14:35  G. Mattia:
Resistive MHD Modelling of Astrophysical Jets

15:05  Gabriel Torralba Paz:
Ion and electron acceleration in strongly magnetized mildly relativistic shocks

SKA - Science with the Square Kilometre Array (MW-1050)

14:00  Conveners of the Session:
Welcome and purpose of this session

14:05  Christina Smith:
The SKA Observatory: Current Status, Early Use, and User Engagement

14:30  Aritra Basu:
The MPIfR-MeerKAT Galactic Plane Survey: unprecedented insight into the ISM

14:42  Anne-Kathrin Baczko:
AGN jets in the era of SKA

14:54  Keito Watanabe:
Probing the High-Energy Universe with Cosmic Rays through SKA-Low

15:06  TBC:
TBC

15:18  Kathrin Grunthal:
The science potential of the SKAO PTA for the detection of nHz GWs

StarClusters - Star Clusters as multi-messenger Candles in the universe (MW-2050)

14:00  Sambaran Banerjee:
Stellar-mass black holes in young massive and open stellar clusters: comparisons with the latest gravitational-wave event population and Gaia compact binaries

14:15  Paulo Solar:
Quantifying collision-driven mass loss in supermassive star formation

14:30  Kai Wu:
From Million-Body Star Clusters over Cosmic Time to Black Hole Growth in Primordial Systems

14:45  Yi Tan:
Runaway Growth and Relativistic Mergers in Black-Hole Clusters

15:00  Navonil Saha:
The effect of triaxial stellar environments on the dynamics of triple supermassive black holes in a cosmological context

15:15  Jorge Saavedra-Bastidas:
Learning the Evolution of Massive Objects in Star Clusters

EScience - E-Science / E-Infrastructures / Virtual Observatory / Machine Learning (MW-2235)

CloseBinaries - Close Binaries and Stellar Mergers (MW-0250)

14:06  Harim Jin:
Chemical fingerprints of binary interaction in massive stars

14:18  Christoph Schürmann:
Populations of evolved massive binary stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud

14:30  Daniel Pauli:
The role of massive star eruptions on stellar and binary evolution

14:42  Cormac Larkin:
Circumstellar environments of recent mass transfer binaries in Westerlund 1

14:54  Chinmaya Nagar:
A Close Look at the Multiplicity of Young Massive Stars in Galactic Embedded Clusters

15:06  Mike Lau:
Unveiling luminous red novae from 3D radiation-hydrodynamic simulations of common-envelope evolution

15:18  Damien Gagnier:
Dynamical friction in stratified stellar envelopes

jungeAG - Junge AG / Young AG (MW-0337)

15:30-16:00 Coffee Break

16:00-17:30 Splinter Sessions (in parallel)

MeVSky - Reopening the MeV Sky with COSI and Beyond (MW-0337)

16:00  Thomas Siegert:
Nuclear Astrophysics with the Compton Spectrometer and Imager

16:25  Chris Karwin:
From Data Challenges to COSI Science

16:45  Pascal Janowski:
Overcoming the limitations of binned response matrices for Compton telescopes

17:00  Tristan Bouchet:
Probing acceleration mechanisms with high-energy spectro-polarimetry

17:15  David Berge:
The future of MeV gamma-ray satellite missions beyond COSI

GalaxyClusters - From protoclusters to galaxy clusters: probing structure formation and cosmology with current and next-generation surveys (MW-1050)

16:05  Dominika Wylezalek:
A dense cosmic knot around an extremely red quasar at z ~3 discovered with the JWST

16:20  Eelco van Kampen:
Surveying large samples of distant galaxy clusters with the Atacama Large Area Sub-mm Telescope (AtLAST)

16:35  Eileen Herwig:
Testing observational protocluster searches with MillenniumTNG

16:50  Mihir Kulkarni:
Can Post-Inflationary Warm Wave Dark Matter Explain the eBOSS Lyman-alpha Power Spectrum Tension?

17:05  Kazuyuki Ogura:
Emission line galaxy model with a semi-analytic galaxy formation model, New Numerical Galaxy Catalog (ν2GC)

17:20  Yinghua Huang:
Exploring the Temperature Dependence of Intrinsic Scatter in the Galaxy Cluster X-ray Luminosity–Temperature Relation

CloseBinaries - Close Binaries and Stellar Mergers (MW-0250)

16:00  Thomas Kupfer:
Observing the most compact binaries with the Time Domain Telescope

16:12  L. Kufleitner:
Hot subdwarf stars from the Hamburg Quasar Survey: Evidence for the merger origin of helium-rich subdwarfs

16:24  Anna Gebhardt:
Probing common-envelope evolution with hot subluminous stars in the PLATO era

16:36  Harry Dawson:
Short-period binary hot subdwarfs: a complete census within 500pc

16:48  Stephania Hernandez:
Building Double-Detonation Supernovae: The Evolutionary Pathway of sdB+WD Binaries

17:00  Felix Arnon Teutloff:
dentifying double-detonation Supernova Ia progenitor systems in the galactic disk

17:12  Eric Stringer:
The population of compact sdB-WD binaries and their role as double detonation progenitors

17:24  Fabian Mattig:
New Hot Subdwarf Binaries from a SOAR Spectroscopic Survey

EScience - E-Science / E-Infrastructures / Virtual Observatory / Machine Learning (MW-2235)

NonThermalAccel - Cosmic Accelerators and the Non-Thermal Universe: From Black Holes to Galaxies and the Cosmic Web (MW-1250)

16:00  Xavier Rodrigues:
Constraining acceleration and diffusion in blazar jets with multi-messenger data

16:20  Patrick Günther:
Constraining Acceleration Mechanisms in Blazar Jets Through Sub-grid Modeling in MHD Simulations

16:40  Felix Glaser:
Probing anisotropic particle acceleration and limb brightening in Centaurus A's jet

17:00  Nikita:
Particle Acceleration and Emission Signatures in Relativistic large-scale AGN Jets

StarClusters - Star Clusters as multi-messenger Candles in the universe (MW-2050)

16:00  Gerhard Hensler:
Extragalactic star clusters – their formation, stellar mass function, and evolution

16:15  Iker Millan Irigoyen :
Near Infrared Wolf–Rayet Features as Tracers of Embedded Young Stellar Clusters

16:30  Cormac Larkin:
Feedback in stellar clusters: Connecting individual winds with collective effects

16:45  Rainer Spurzem:
Dense star clusters, massive Black holes, gravitational waves

17:45-19:15 AG Mitgliederversammlung (MPA E.0.11 / virtual MGV)