The team of Philipp May, Samuel Schumacher and Anna Julia Poser from the Institute of Physics at the University of Rostock has won 10,000 euros for the implementation of its project "Redesigning the Warnemünde Planetary Path". Last year, Wissenschaft im Dialog gGmbH called on students, doctoral candidates and young researchers from all disciplines to submit their communication ideas on the topic of "Our Universe" - the theme of the Year of Science 2023. From more than 70 submissions, a jury of experts has now selected the Rostock project as one of 15 winners.

The Warnemünde Planetary Path provides six kilometers of information about our solar system and is the only planetary path in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The existing path includes ten information panels on the individual planets. With this astronomical teaching and hiking trail, sizes and distances of the most important bodies of the solar system are represented in a 1:1,000,000 model: one meter of trail corresponds to a distance of 1 million km in space.

The project team from the Institute of Physics of the University of Rostock would like to modernize and develop this path in close cooperation with the initiators of the Planetary Path from the Astronomischer Verein Rostock e.V. as an educational path for the public and to encourage a dialog about current astrophysical research in and around Rostock. Among other things, new information boards with QR codes and artistic 3D planetary models will be installed. In addition, they plan to develop an audio guide and a website with dynamic content, for example on currently visible planets.
Work will begin in March. For the planned inauguration of the new path in the summer, an athletic planet run and a series of lectures are planned. Finally, at the end of the year, the projects will be reviewed once again and evaluated to determine which teams have communicated the topic of the universe in a particularly creative and accessible way.