Origins Cluster

The Excellence Cluster ORIGINS is an interdisciplinary research network that focuses on the evolution of the Universe from the Big Bang to the emergence of life. ORIGINS links particle and fundamental physicists who work on the smallest quantum scales of the early Universe with astro- and biophysicists who focus on galaxies, stars, planets and the origin of life. The five big questions of ORIGINS are: • What are the fundamental forces and structures? • How did our Universe form and evolve? • How did the cosmic network with its galaxies, stars and planets come into being? • How did the building blocks of the Universe evolve from simple atoms to prebiotic molecules? • How did life on Earth come into being and is there life in space elsewhere? The Excellence Cluster ORIGINS is funded within the framework of the Excellence Strategy of the German Research Foundation (DFG). The interdisciplinary research project is a cooperation of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) and the Technische Universität München (TUM) as well as the Max Planck Institutes for Astrophysics (MPA), Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE), Physics (MPP), Plasma Physics (IPP) and Biochemistry (MPIB), the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and the Leibniz supercomputing center (LRZ). ORIGINS is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany´s Excellence Strategy – EXC-2094 – 390783311.