Brussels, 16 April 2024 – Today the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Gaia collaboration teams reveal the discovery of a high-mass stellar black hole of 33 times our Sun’s mass in the Milky Way. The Royal Observatory of Belgium contributed to this discovery thanks to the radial velocity data it helped to process.
Third black hole discovered with Gaia data
A stellar black [...]
Brussels, 11 April 2024 – When astronomers looked at a stellar pair at the heart of a stunning cloud of gas and dust, they were in for a surprise. Star pairs are typically very similar, like twins, but in HD 148937, one star appears younger and, unlike the other, is magnetic. In a newly published Science research paper, scientists, including Laurent Mahy [...]
150 years ago, on February 17, 1874, Adolphe Quetelet, founder and first director of the Royal Observatory of Belgium, passed away. He was one of the best-known Belgians of his time. A keen statistician, he is best known as the inventor of the Quetelet index, better known today as the BMI (Body Mass Index). Books have been written about this [...]
February 11 is the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, a day recognised by UNESCO. According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 33.3% of scientists are women. This percentage is of the same order of magnitude as that of female researchers at the Royal Observatory of Belgium, which is between 30 and 35% women among its scientific staff. [...]
In 2023, 120 earthquakes and 3 induced earthquakes were located by the Royal Observatory of Belgium in or near Belgium. Six earthquakes were felt by the population near the Belgian territory (Germany). [...]
On Saturday 16 December 2023, the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium awarded two of its prizes to Dr Orkun Temel and Dr Thibault Merle, two scientists working at the Royal Observatory of Belgium. [...]
On December 19, we are celebrating the 10th anniversary of the launch of the ESA Gaia satellite.
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The European Geosciences Union (EGU) announced on 16 November 2023 the recipients of its 2024 awards and medals. Véronique Dehant, of the Royal Observatory of Belgium, stood out among her peers as the recipient of the Jean Dominique Cassini Medal. This accolade recognizes her outstanding contributions to Earth, planetary, and space sciences. [...]
On Wednesday 8 November 1983, 40 years ago, a medium-sized earthquake shook the city of Liège. This earthquake occurred in the middle of the night at 1:49 am local time (0:49 UTC) and had its epicenter in the commune of Saint-Nicolas, a densely populated municipality west of the city of Liège. This is the last earthquake with significant damage in [...]
The ESA Gaia mission website recently published an image of a planetary nebula, supplemented with three years of data gathered by the satellite. Inside this object, twinkles a blue dot with a very regular pulse of light. This is the mother binary star system of the planetary nebula. Truly a hefty cosmic clock in our galaxy! [...]