News

New Insights Into the Liquid Core of Mars Published in Nature

New results from the radio-science instrument of the NASA InSight mission on Mars are published today in the scientific journal Nature. With the data accumulated during the first two and a half years of the mission, a team of planetary scientists mainly from the Royal Observatory of Belgium has precisely measured the rotation of Mars. They detected a signature that [...]

Official launch of the EPOS Data Portal for Solid Earth Sciences

The platform “EPOS Data Portal”, the first and only pan-European research infrastructure for Solid Earth Sciences, is being presented at the EGU General Assembly 2023 (April 25, 2023). The EPOS Data Portal will allow scientists, students and stakeholders to access multidisciplinary scientific data and products, promoting open science research to better understand Earth system dynamics. The Royal Observatory of Belgium [...]

JUICE: Exploring the Icy Moons of Jupiter

On 13 April 2023 at 14:15 Belgian time, the ESA spacecraft JUICE will take off on board an Ariane 5 launcher from ESA’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guyana. After an 8-year-long journey, JUICE, an acronym for JUpiter ICy moons Explorer, will investigate Jupiter and its icy moons, with a special focus on Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system. [...]

Belgian and Indian astronomers celebrated their successful collaboration during their third workshop

After almost 9 years of existence, the Belgo-Indian Network for Astronomy and astrophysics (BINA) celebrated a new milestone with the inauguration of the ILMT (International Liquid Mirror Telescope), located at the Devasthal Observatory in the north of India on 21 March 2023. This event was followed by the third BINA workshop on 22–24 March 2023, in Bhimtal, India. Several scientists [...]

New type of oscillations discovered on the Sun

The Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) telescope aboard the satellite Solar Orbiter was able to observe magnetic loops that shake back and forth very quickly. These vibrations are very small, but are ubiquitous and ever-present. Scientists suspect that it is these movements that heat the environment around the Sun to millions of degrees Celsius. By comparison, the solar surface is only [...]

The Royal Observatory of Belgium commits to gender equality in science

Although their numbers are increasing, women are still under-represented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and their potential is not sufficiently recognised and taken into account. At the Royal Observatory of Belgium (ORB-KSB), initiatives to promote women in science have been carried out by several collaborators in recent years. In addition, the ORB-KSB has very recently started working on [...]