Karl Martin Menten

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Karl Martin Menten (born October 3, 1957 in Briedel ) is a German radio astronomer . He is director for millimeter and submillimeter astronomy at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn.

After completing his military service, Menten studied physics at the University of Bonn from 1977 with a diploma in radio astronomy in 1984 and his doctorate in 1987 on methanol in our galaxy ( Interstellar Methanol towards Galactic HII Regions ), working with the Effelsberg radio telescope . He was a post-doctoral student at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts . He stayed there and became a radio astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in 1992 , a lecturer in astronomy at Harvard in 1995, and a senior radio astronomer in 1996. In 1991 he discovered strong signals from methanol masers in star formation areas and developed a method for investigating the formation of massive stars. In addition, with the VLBA he was able to obtain information about the structure and dynamics of our galaxy from high-resolution images of the distribution of these grains. Since 1996 he has been director of mm and sub-mm astronomy at the MPIfR in Bonn and its managing director from 2008 to 2013. Since 2000 he has also been an honorary professor at the University of Bonn and since 2001 a member of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences.

Among other things, he dealt with the formation of stars of great mass from gas clouds, chemical processes in these gas clouds, astrophysical measles and lasers , radio astronomical images of protostars , young stars (also in the early phase of the universe) and gas cloud envelopes of stars in the later phase of theirs Evolution, the center of our galaxy and other galaxies, interstellar gas / dust and its formation on a cosmological scale and gravitational lenses. He describes his research field as molecular astronomy and his lecture on the occasion of the Jansky Prize was accordingly Tuning in to the molecular universe .

In addition to the MPIfR's Effelsberg radio telescope, he also used the Pico del Veleta telescope of the Institute for Radio Astronomy in the Millimeter Range (IRAM), the Very Large Array (VLA) and Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) of the NRAO .

In 2001 he was the initiator and he is the Principal Investigator in the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX), for which a large part of the instrumentation comes from the MPIfR. He is also involved in the (2012) ALMA in the Atacama Desert, which is currently being set up.

In 2003 he and Frank Bertoldi and Ernst Kreysa received the Philip Morris Research Prize for large bolometer receivers for (sub) -mm astronomy . In 2007 he was the first German to hold the NRAO's Karl G. Jansky Lecture . In 2009 he received an Advanced Investigator Grant from the European Research Council for the Glostar project (Global view of star formation in the Milky Way).

In 1991 he was a visiting scientist at Caltech . He has been a member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences since 2001, a member of the Leopoldina since 2004 and an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society since 2012 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See the MPG website on the Jansky Prize for Menten in the web links
  2. ^ Member entry by Karl Martin Menten (with picture) at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on February 18, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Menten, Karl Martin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German radio astronomer
DATE OF BIRTH October 3, 1957
PLACE OF BIRTH Briedel