The reference date and amplitudes of the minima and maxima of the 11-year solar cycle are established on the base of the sunspot number maintained and distributed by the SILSO World Data center since 1981 at the Royal Observatory of Belgium.
Over past years, the rather weak cycle that had peaked in 2014 has been progressively declining, heralding the approach of [...]
On August 4, 2020, the superconducting (or cryogenic) gravimeter has been measuring for 25 years the variations of gravity with the precision of one hundredth of a billionth (10-11) of g (g = 9.81 m/s²). [...]
Research published in the journal Science has shown that lockdown measures to combat the spread of COVID-19 led to a 50% reduction in seismic noise observed around the world in early to mid 2020. [...]
The 2020 edition of Science & Culture at the Royal Palace will not take place in situ. The Federal Science Policy invites you to an original virtual tour, revisited and adapted to the particular circumstances. [...]
The first images made by the telescope EUI onboard the space mission Solar Orbiter are released. The EUI instrument, under Belgian lead, discovered campfires on the Sun.
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The telescopes of the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) onboard Solar Orbiter opened their doors on May 12 2020 to photograph the Sun. This ‘First Light’ is a milestone, but also a critical step where many things can go wrong. The teams of scientists and operators are forced to work and communicate remotely.
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Within an EoS (Excellence of Science) project, Véronique Dehant, researcher at the Royal Observatory of Belgium, participated in a study on the formation and the evolution of the atmosphere of Venus under the influence of asteroid impacts. This study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, concluded that the asteroids that contributed to the end of the accretion of Venus, and [...]
The Solar Orbiter spacecraft was launched on February 10, 2020 from Cape Canaveral, carrying onboard the space telescope Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI). On February 25, EUI got the wake up call. At this stage we can happily report that EUI is awake: its temperature is ok, its computer has been successfully powered on and completed the self-tests and EUI could [...]
Brussels, February 24, 2020 – The NASA InSight mission to Mars has benefited from a significant contribution from scientists of the Royal Observatory of Belgium since its inception. They have located the landing site, reconstructed the landing trajectory and helped interpret the seismic data. The journal Nature Geoscience just published a series of articles that present these results, obtained after [...]
NASA will launch the Solar Orbiter spacecraft from Cape Canaveral, with 10 scientific instruments on board, including the space telescope Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI). Solar Orbiter is an ESA mission, with an important contribution from NASA, which will study the Sun from close up. The EUI instrument was built by a European consortium under the leadership of the Centre Spatial [...]