On Dec 8th, a ‘FestKolloquium’ was held in honour of Werner Hofmann and Felix Aharonian, two giants in the field of very-high-energy astrophysics. Both were born in 1952, and have been linked to the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics for many years. Their respective 70th birthdays were collectively celebrated with a special colloquium from the renowned theoretical physicist Prof. Subir Sarkar of Oxford University, “A challenge to the standard cosmological model”.
Although the event could also be followed online, numerous congratulators had travelled not only from the region, but even from abroad.
Werner Hofmann joined the institute as Director in 1988 aged only 35 and moving from a full professor position at Berkeley. Since 2019 he is Director Emeritus.
Felix Aharonian joined the institute in 1992, and was elected as External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society in 2006. In the same year, he was appointed as Professor in the Astronomy and Astrophysics Section of the School of Cosmic Physics, Dublin, but in parallel maintained the active High Energy Astrophysics Theory research group at MPIK.
Both Felix Aharonian and Werner Hofmann remain extremely active contributors to many of the scientific efforts of the institute, and we wish them many more years of good health and success.
Presentations (PDFs of the slides):
Laudatio
Colloquium
