news 2019

Let's first state the obvious: the universe is endlessly fascinating. When the first ever picture of a black hole was released this spring, it easily made front pages.

Exploring the heart (core) of Mars will elucidate the red planet's evolution and thus determine whether life would be possible in the future In 2020 the ExoMars mission will send a platform with the LaRa, a 100% Belgian-made instrument , supervised by UCLouvain researcher Véronique Dehant LaRa's objective  is to observe Mars's rotation in order to understand its core Info: https://lara.oma.be and https://exploration.esa&peri

On behalf of the ESA, UCLouvain has developed antennas for the LaRa instrument that will go to Mars in 2020 to study the red planet's habitability.

Bioscience engineers at KU Leuven have developed a method to measure the snow depth in all mountain ranges in the Northern Hemisphere using satellites. This technique makes it possible to study areas that cannot be accessed for local measurements, such as the Himalayas. The findings were published .

Blue supergiants are rock 'n' roll: they live fast and die young. This makes them rare and difficult to study. Before space telescopes were invented, few blue supergiants had been observed, so our knowledge of these stars was limited. Using recent NASA space telescope data, an international team led by KU Leuven studied the sounds originating inside these stars and discovered that almost all blue supergiants shimmer in brightness because of waves on their surface.

Red giants are old stars that eject gaseous material and solid particles through a stellar wind. Some red giants appeared to lose an exceptionally large amount of mass this way. However, new observations reveal that this is not quite the case. The stellar wind is not more intense than normal, but is affected by a partner that was overlooked until now: a second star that circles the red giant.