The SFB 1601 organises frequent scientific colloquia. Guests are Welcome! Venue: University of Cologne, Physics Institutes (Zülpicher Str. 77), Lecture Hall III or MPIfR, Auf dem Hügel 69, Bonn, Seminar Room 0.02 The colloquia will start with a coffee/tea reception at 01:45 pm in front of the lecture hall.

The Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope is now ready to be assembled at its destination in the Atacama Desert. Planned to take up operations in April 2026, it will be able to look all the way back to the Big Bang, revealing new details about star and galaxy formation.

On 17 January, the telescope started its journey from the port of Wesel via Antwerp to its new location in Chile. With a novel optical design with 2 mirrors of diameter of six metres, innovative instruments and unique site, it will be one of the most powerful survey telescopes in the world at submm wavelenghts.

Photograph of the two split-block halves of the 8-way power divider, showing the waveguides with the isolator chips. Output ports are numbered

Stars form within molecular clouds, dense regions of cold gas primarily composed of molecular hydrogen. These clouds provide the necessary conditions for the formation of stars, including low temperatures and high densities, which allow gravitational forces to overcome thermal pressure and initiate the collapse of gas. To fully understand the process of star formation and therefore the evolution of galaxies, it is crucial to study the properties of molecular clouds—such as their mass, density, distribution, and relation to the galactic environment. The Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS (PHANGS) collaboration aims to create a comprehensive view of star formation and the lifecycle of gas and dust in nearby galaxies, using state-of-the-art facilities. In particular, by leveraging the James

Line Intensity Mapping (LIM) is an emerging technique in radio-astronomy that scans vast fractions of the sky with a large beam and detects the integrated emission of all sources along the line of sight without resolving individual objects. This approach enables probing the high-redshift Universe including the contribution from intrinsically faint sources that traditional surveys miss due to their flux-limit thresholds. These peculiarities make LIM an ideal tool to probe the nature of dark matter (DM). Most particle-physics candidates for DM fall into the class of thermal relics (i.e. particles that were once in thermal equilibrium with the rest of the Universe). In this case, the velocity dispersion of the particles at early times turns out to be inversely proportional