Max Plank Institute for Astrophysics

The Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics is a theoretical astrophysics institute of the Max Planck Society on the research campus in Garching, immediately north of Munich, Germany. It was established in 1958 and has been located in Garching since the institute's move to that campus in the 1970s. It is a specialist Max Planck institute organized around research groups in theory and computation rather than undergraduate colleges.

Research concentrates on cosmology, the formation and evolution of galaxies, stellar astrophysics, and large-scale numerical simulation. The Garching site sits beside the European Southern Observatory headquarters and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, with Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Technical University of Munich nearby. Doctoral researchers commonly enter through the International Max Planck Research School on Astrophysics.

The scientific population is on the order of a hundred researchers, including doctoral candidates and postdoctoral fellows, with a high share of international staff from Europe, North America, and Asia. There is no undergraduate college. Group leaders and directors in cosmology and stellar theory supervise dissertations, and alumni move into university astronomy departments, observatories, and computational science.

Graduate study is the doctorate, usually with the university degree awarded by LMU Munich or another partner university. Training is supervision inside a theory group, with research-school courses and seminars, not a large taught-master's program. Garching is a research-campus setting of offices, computing facilities, and shared canteens; many students live in Munich or the northern suburbs and commute to the institute.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, Max Plank Institute for Astrophysics lists 1 doctoral program, in physics.