Frank Eisenhauer

Frank Eisenhauer (born 9 June 1968 in Augsburg) is a German astronomer and astrophysicist, a director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE),[1] and a professor at Technical University of Munich.

[2] As a director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE), Eisenhauer leads the development and scientific evaluation of large astronomical instruments.

Eisenhauer has been instrumental in the development of astronomy with the highest spatial resolution and imaging spectroscopy, contributing in particular to the discovery and study of the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.

Similar to adaptive optics, GRAVITY actively corrects for the interfering influences of the Earth's atmosphere and disturbances in the light path between the telescope and the laboratory, improving sensitivity by several orders of magnitude compared to previous experiments.

In 2018, this enabled Eisenhauer and colleagues to detect, in particular, the redshift in the gravitational field of a black hole predicted from Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity.