RESEARCH institutes in the former West Germany are getting a taste of the
harsh medicine that their East German comrades received five years ago after
unification. Scientific evaluators, who made tens of thousands of East German
scientists redundant in 1991, are now streamlining or closing several institutes
in western Germany.
The Science Council, an independent body based in Cologne that advises the
government, will release its latest evaluation in the coming week. So far, after
looking at 14 western institutions, it has recommended closing or drastically
reducing support for five. These include the Gmelin Institute for Inorganic
Chemistry in Frankfurt, the Research Institute for Child Nutrition in Dortmund,
and the Medical Institute for Environmental Hygiene in Düsseldorf. Next
week’s verdicts will cover a further 10 institutes.
Reviews completed so far have found serious problems even in those western
German institutes that the Science Council says deserve continued support. These
included rigid, hierarchical structures, with directors who did not communicate
with their employees, and fragmented, incoherent research programmes. To fight
this stagnation, the council told several institutes to reduce the number of
permanent employees and replace them with workers on short contracts.
Only certain research institutes in western Germany, called Blue List
institutes, are affected by the Science Council’s evaluations. The funding for
these institutes, which are relatively small, comes from the federal and state
governments. More prestigious research centres, such as the Max Planck
institutes and the applied research institutes of the Fraunhofer Society, are
exempted from the Science Council’s scrutiny.
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Eastern scientists take a certain grim pleasure in the evaluations. Many felt
that they were unfairly targeted in the past. After German unification, the
Science Council examined only eastern institutes and its recommendations
eliminated dozens of them.
Most of the East German institutes that survived were placed on the Blue
List, instead of being integrated into the Max Planck or Fraunhofer
organisations. As a result, they face another evaluation by the Science Council
beginning later this year.
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)
