Honorary doctorate for Eberhard Grün

The Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics congratulates Prof. Dr. Eberhard Grün on being awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Stuttgart, which thus honours him as the discoverer of interstellar dust in the solar system and founder of the research field of dust astronomy. He has been at the forefront of in-situ research into cosmic dust worldwide for 40 years.

Eberhard Grün headed the "dust group" at the MPIK until 2007, where he continues to be active as a scientific guest. Since the 1970s, he was instrumental in advancing the development of dust detectors for space probes that analyse cosmic dust according to mass, velocity and direction. The dust detectors were on board interplanetary missions such as Helios, Galileo, Ulysses and Cassini. These have identified dust streams accelerated by Jupiter's magnetic field from volcanoes on Io, ice streams from cryovolcanoes on Enceladus feeding Saturn's E ring, and the flow of interstellar dust through the solar system. From the data, Grün developed an interplanetary dust model that today bears his name and is used worldwide.

Eberhard Grün received the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2011 and an asteroid was named after him already in 1996.


Meldung der Universität Stuttgart (german)

Youtube Clip


Contact

Prof. Dr. Dr.-Ing. E.h. Eberhard Grün
Email: eberhard.gruen@mpi-hd.mpg.de

Apl.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ralf Srama
Universität Stuttgart, Institut für Raumfahrtsysteme
Email: srama@irs.uni-stuttgart.de


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The Rector of the University of Stuttgart Prof. Dr.-Ing. Wolfram Ressel presents the certificate to Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Eberhard Grün during a ceremony. (Foto: Universität Stuttgart/Regenscheit)