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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
An article in Nature Geoscience on the rotation of the Earth’s core (more precisely its solid inner core) was recently published. However, the media have been misled by the press release of the science journal into thinking that the inner core stopped rotating or was even rotating in the opposite direction to that of the Earth surface, which is not [...]
In 2022, 99 earthquakes and 40 induced earthquakes were located by the Royal Observatory of Belgium in or near Belgium. 4 events were felt by the population on Belgian territory. [...]
On 20 December 2022, the superconducting gravimeter in Membach (High Fens, Belgium) will have measured variations in gravity for 10 000 consecutive days. Installed on 4 August 1995 by the Royal Observatory of Belgium, this gravimeter has held a double world record since 18 September 2017: that of the instrument that has measured variations in gravity at a single location [...]
On 29 November 2022 at 10:00., Secretary of State Thomas Dermine, Scientific Director Valérie Trouet and Operational Director Ella Jamsin officially opened the Climate Centre at the Space Pole in Uccle. Belgian and international scientific, industrial, academic, federal and political representatives attended this event. Bertrand Piccard, who flew around the world with the solar plane Solar Impulse, was the special [...]
A partial solar eclipse will take place on Tuesday, 25 October 2022 and will be visible in Belgium. In Uccle, the eclipse will be visible between 11:10 (first contact) and 13:00 (last contact), and its maximum will take place at 12:04 in Belgian time (UTC + 2 h). From Belgium, this will be a small eclipse, with the Moon covering only about [...]
On 24 March 2022, it will have been 30 years since the first Belgian went into space. It was on this date that astronaut Dirk Frimout left for space in the American shuttle Atlantis. The year 2022 also marks the 20thanniversary of Frank De Winne’s first space flight. These anniversaries should not pass unnoticed, which is why we are organising Belgian Space week. An event at the Planetarium on 20 October (7pm-9:30pm) puts space research in [...]