People / Günther Wuchterl

Lecturer/s

Günther Wuchterl

Günther Wuchterl

Günther Wuchterl (born 1962) is a scientist associated with  the space telescope CoRoT commissioned by Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt at the Thüringer Landessternwarte in Tautenburg near Jena. He read applied physics and applied mathematics at Vienna’s  University of Technology and astronomy, philosophy and zoology at Vienna University. Since 1988 Wuchterl has held different posts at the  Astronomical Institutes of Heidelberg, Leiden and Vienna Universities and at the Institute for Nuclear Physics at TU Vienna. In 1989 he was awarded a PhD for a thesis on role of fluid dynamics in the genesis of gaseous planets. In 1992 – the year of the discovery of the first exoplanet, he was a member of an internation research team on the genesis of planets at the University of Santa Barbara, USA. Work on a wide range of theories and on methodological and computational issues regarding the genesis of stars, planets and Brown Dwarves took up the following years. Between 2000 and 2003 Wuchterl was engaged in research work at the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. In 2001 he took part in the hitherto most extensive campaign of observation of the artificial illumination of the night sky. Since then he has been committed, inter alia as the Austrian President of the international Dark Sky Association, to doing work to protect the night sky.
In 2005 the discovery of the first extrasolar planet to be directly imaged, GQ Lupi, was announced, which was followed in 2007 by the discovery of another extrasolar planet from space – Wuchterl is a member of the research team.