About me

Prof. Dr. Karl M. Menten

03. October 1957 — 30. December 2024

Director
Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie
Millimeter and Submillimeter Astronomy Division

Auf dem Huegel 69, D-53121 Bonn
Phone: +49 228 525 471

On December 30, 2024, Professor Dr. Karl Martin Menten, Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society and director at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, died at the age of 67. Karl Menten was an outstanding scientist, a invaluable mentor, and a great person. We miss him very much and look back with gratitude on the time we spent together.

Obituary

 

Here you find my CV and an my bibliography

Dr. Karl Menten became the Director for Millimeter and Submillimeter Astronomy at the Max-Planck-Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, Germany in December 1996 and, since 2019 takes a turn a the institute’s  Managing Director. From 2001 on, he has been a Honorary Professor and member of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences of Bonn University.

At the MPIfR he works with these fantastic people and a very international group of students.

Dr. Menten earned his Dr. rer. nat. degree from Bonn University in 1987 after performing the work for his dissertation (and, earlier, for his Diploma thesis) at the MPIfR. Thereafter, he became a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Radio and Geoastronomy Division of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, MA. He stayed at the CfA as a Research Associate (1989–1992), in 1992 was appointed Radio Astronomer and, finally, (in 1996) Senior Radio Astronomer. From 1995 on he also was a Lecturer on Astronomy at the Astronomy Department of Harvard University.

Most of Dr. Menten’s research involves radio and (sub)millimeter wavelength emission from dust and molecules in the Universe and their chemistry. Areas of concentration have included the formation of (in particular high-mass) stars in Giant Molecular Clouds, astrophysical masers and lasers, imaging radio emission from protostars, young stellar objects, and evolved stars, circumstellar envelopes, the central regions of our and other galaxies, atomic and molecular gas, dust and star formation at cosmological distances and gravitational lenses.

For his studies, Dr. Menten uses a variety of telescopes suited to different wavelengths. These include the MPIfR’s Effelsberg 100m telescope, the 30 m telescope on Pico Veleta and the Northern Extended Millimeter ArrAy (NOEMA)  operated by the Institute for Radio Astronomy at Millimeter Wavelengths (IRAM) and, predominantly, the Very Large Array the  (VLA) and the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) operated by the US National Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). At shorter (far infrared) wavelength he is a frequent user of the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a collaboration of the US National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR).

In 2001, he initiated and presently is Principal Investigator of the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX), which, since 2005, operates a novel 12 meter diameter submillimeter wavelength telescope at 5100 meters altitude in Chile at the site on which the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimer Array (ALMA), which now is the most powerful observatory of its kind. Most of the instrumentation his group uses at APEX, in particular large format incoherent detector arrays and single pixel heterodyne receivers and small arrays, together with the necessary digital electronics is developed by the MPIfR’s Division for Submillimeter Technology, which also builds instrumentation for SOFIA.

Dr. Menten has coauthored more than 800 refereed publications and has received various honors, including two Smithsonian Institution career awards and, in 2007, the 42nd annual Karl G. Jansky Lectureship awarded by the NRAO. As a member of the Event HorizonTelescope collaboration, he shared the 2019 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and (in 2019-2021) various other prominent awards. He is an elected member of the North-Rhine Westphalian Academy of Sciences and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.

On December 30, 2024, Professor Menten died unexpected at the age of 67.