ESA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft has discovered a multitude of tiny jets of material escaping from the Sun’s outer atmosphere. Each jet lasts for between 20 and 100 seconds, and expels plasma at around 100 km/s. These jets could be the long-sought-after source of the ‘solar wind’. [...]
Brussels, 23 August 2023 – The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has recorded breathtaking new images of the iconic Ring Nebula, one of the best-known planetary nebulae. Those images were publicly released this month by an international team of astronomers, which includes Griet Van de Steene and Peter van Hoof, researchers of the Royal Observatory of Belgium. In a paper [...]
A joint scientific team led by the Royal Observatory of Belgium (ROB) and the KU Leuven has found that high-frequency magnetic waves could play an essential role in keeping the Sun’s atmosphere at millions of degrees. This finding sheds a new light on the most intriguing solar mystery: what makes the Sun’s atmosphere hotter than its surface? [...]
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the legendary album The Dark Side of The Moon by the band Pink Floyd, the Brussels Planetarium invites you to discover a 360° film specially created to illustrate the ten tracks of the record. Images of the solar system combined with visual effects designed with the participation of the graphic designer who imagined the visual concept of the cover of The Dark Side of The Moon come to accompany the musical tracks. [...]
On Saturday, June 24, 2023, from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., 12 women scientists in Belgium will tell you about their research during the Soapbox Science Brussels event at the Carrefour de l’Europe/Europakruispunt, in front of the Central Station. [...]
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 [...]
The GRASS (GRAvimeter for Small Solar system bodies) instrument developed within the ESA Hera mission has recently undergone a successful environmental test campaign.
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On May 2, 2023, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of the United States of America announced the election of its new members. Dr Véronique Dehant, researcher at the Royal Observatory of Belgium, was elected as an international member. [...]
Seismology has been used as a means of exploring the Earth’s interior for over a century. With the recent detection of Mars quakes by the seismometer of the InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) mission, scientists can now probe the Martian deep interior. [...]
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 [...]