The Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics was founded on January 9, 1995 by merging the former facilities: Astronomical Institute, Department Theoretical Astrophysics and Department Physics with High Performance Computers. These are now sections of the new Institute, which organise their own business autonomously (personnel, budget, rooms, scientific projects).
On July 18, 2007 all sections of the institute, together with other particle physics sections of the University of Tübingen, founded the Kepler Center for Astro and Particle Physics, to bundle the existing competence in the fields of Astrophysics and Particle Physics for research and teaching and to extend this further. It is also intended to expedite the close cooperation between theory and experiment at the exploration of the structure of the universe in combination with the fundamental building blocks of matter and its interactions.
