News

Heat waves on the Sun

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? [...]

The Dark Side of the Moon Planetarium Experience

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. [...]

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. [...]