Cosmos
Our aim is to understand the origin and evolution of stars, galaxies, and planets like Earth. The search for our cosmic ancestry is key to understand Earth as a member of a planetary system orbiting a star, orbiting a galaxy, interacting with the interplanetary and interstellar medium, exposed to cosmic events potentially affecting life on the planet.
For this purpose, we use and technically contribute to large telescopes of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and high-performance ESA and NASA satellites, as well as UniBRITE, Austria’s first own satellite.
The research within Cosmos often requires the interdisciplinary combination of several branches of science. Together, observation, theory, numerical simulations, data visualization, and instrumentation form the basis for fundamental insights into key processes in the universe, including the origin of our planet, its relation to the solar system and the Milky Way, and conditions for life.