DYNAVERSE is a new Cluster of Excellence between the Universities of Cologne and Bonn, the Forschungszentrum Jülich, the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, the German Aerospace Center and the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies. It is a world-class hub of expertise in radio astronomy, lab-experiments, simulations, and machine learning / artificial intelligence. Dynaverse brings together researchers from Astrophysics, Computer Science and Mathematics. State-of-the-art research facilities to which our team has priority access combined with the expertise in high-performance computing, and data-analytics will generate new ground-breaking opportunities.

The Collaborative Research Center (CRC/SFB) 1601 involves researchers investigating the physical processes that determine the habitats of massive stars in different galactic environments. Due to their short lifetime and high energy output, massive stars drive the evolution of galaxies across cosmic time. Therefore, they contribute substantially to shaping the present-day Universe. Habitats are the gaseous environments in which massive stars are born and which they interact with via their feedback. In the CRC 1601 detailed knowledge of massive star formation in the Milky Way are connected with that of the early epochs of the Universe. We aim to connect the physical processes that govern the habitats of massive stars across a broad range of environments to Mpc scales and from the Milky Way to the high-redshift Universe, where massive stars leave their cosmological fingerprint by driving cosmic reionisation.

Based on the laboratory spectroscopy in this project, new molecules will be found in space will be found by Prof. Dr. Stephan Schlemmer and his group. We shall unravel the role of the most important missing ions which will have great impact on the interpretation of astrophysical observations. At the same time understanding the spectra of the missing ions will challenge the current concept of molecular structure and thus lead to an advancement of molecular physics as a whole.