Karl Schuster becomes external scientific member at the MPE
The Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics is pleased to announce that Dr Karl Schuster, director of the Institute for Radio Astronomy at Millimetre wavelengths (IRAM) in Grenoble, has been appointed as external scientific member at the MPE. By developing detectors and receiver systems and with the NOEMA project - an extended IRAM millimetre interferometer - he makes significant contributions to using millimetre and sub-millimetre wavelengths for a wide range of astronomical topics.
IRAM director Karl Schuster is a new External Scientific Member at the MPE.
After receiving his PhD at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich in 1993, Karl Schuster actively pushed detector development for the millimetre and sub-millimetre range both as an employee and as leader of the superconducting detector laboratory at IRAM. As a consequence, the IRAM Plateau de Bure interferometer has been the leading millimetre observatory worldwide for more than a decade and served as basis for several fundamental astrophysical results. Scientists at MPE, for example, used it to carry out the the first systematic characterization of the gas content of normal galaxies in the early universe. Furthermore, other observatories such as Herschel and ALMA use detector technology developed at IRAM. As head of the NOEMA project and director of IRAM since 2013, Karl Schuster is driving the evolution of the Plateau-de-Bure interferometer as a leading observatory.
The IRAM Plateau de Bure millimetre interferometre, which is currently being extended to become the NOEMA interferometer. Then it will provide astronomers with 12 antennae and further enhanced detectors.
In addition to his experimental work, Karl Schuster actively pursues astronomical research. Together with colleagues, he used the HERA array, which he developed himself, at the IRAM 30m telescope to study the spatially resolved molecular gas in nearby galaxies and to investigate the relationship between gas and star formation.
Karl Schuster is looking forward to further cooperation: "During the next few years, we should be able to make some great steps forward, when Max Planck scientists are using the new experimental capabilities of IRAM."
Other External Scientific Members at MPE are Ewine van Dishoeck, Vladimir Fortov, John Kormendy, Roald Sagdeev, Maarten Schmidt, Yasuo Tanaka, and Charles Townes.