Month: October 2018

If you look up at the sky on a clear night you can see stars, lots of stars. Astronomical recordings from observatories let you see them in much greater detail. The Dr. Remeis Observatory in Bamberg, which belongs to Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, owns approximately 40,000 historical photographic plates, a genuine treasure trove for anyone interested in stargazing. Together with Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam and the Universities of Hamburg and Tartu (Estonia), astronomers at FAU have now digitalised roughly 70,000 such glass plates and published them online at www.plate-archive.org.

Physicists at FAU have proven that incoming light causes the electrons in warm perovskites to rotate thus influencing the direction of the flow of electrical current. They have thus found the key to an important characteristic of these crystals, which could play an important role in the development of new solar cells. The results have now been published in the renowned journal ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’.