About Göttingen and the IAG

The conference is held in the university town Göttingen (pop. ~120,000, of which more than 25,000 are students), which is situated in the South of the German state Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony), about 120 km South of Hanover.

→ Wikipedia page about Göttingen

→ Homepage of the City of Göttingen

Göttingen is famous for its university and a long and illustrious line of physicists, mathematicians and chemists - Born, Clebsch, Courant, Debye, Dehmelt, Dirichlet, Eigen, Franck, Gauß, Glaser, Goeppert-Mayer, Hahn, Heisenberg, Hilbert, Klein, Landau, Minkowski, Neher, Nernst, Paul, Planck, Prantl, Riemann, Runge, Schwarzschild, von Laue, von Neumann, Wallach, Weber, Wöhler, and many others - Göttingen is also the home of five Max-Planck-Institutes and the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft und Raumfahrt.

 Astronomy has a long tradition at Göttingen University. The first observatory was founded in 1748 only 14 years after the University itself. In 1816 a new observatory outside the former city was completed. Carl Friedrich Gauß who had been appointed as a professor for astronomy in Göttingen in 1807 became its first director. At the beginning of the 20th century Karl Schwarzschild worked as a professor at the Observatory (1901-1909) and established the modern astrophysical tradition in Göttingen. The observatory building was home for teaching and research in astrophysics until 2005.

→ more information on the history of the University Observatory

The Institute for Astrophysics Göttingen (IAG) is the successor of the Universitätssternwarte Göttingen (University Observatory). The Institute for Astrophysics shares synergies with the other institutes of the Faculty of Physics in a new building (built 2002-2005) on the northern campus of the University where occupies the upper two floors of the Northern wings of the Physics Faculty building (built in 2002-05), 3 km to the north of the city centre.

we thank Klaus Reinsch(IAG) for compiling most of the information here