A joint US-European team successfully launched a space probe from the Kennedy Space Center. Scientists hope the probe will take the first photos of the sun's polar regions on a journey that could last up to nine years.
NASA illustration of satellite near the sun Image: picture-alliance/AP/NASA/SDO/P. Testa
Advertisement
A joint US-European team successfully launched the Space Orbiter probe on Sunday night from the US state of Florida on a mission to "address big questions" about the solar system, including taking the first-ever high-resolution pictures of the sun's poles.
Space Orbiter blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral at 11:03 p.m. Sunday (0403 UTC Monday) atop an Atlas V411 rocket.
The US space agency, NASA, and European Space Agency (ESA) are collaborating on the mission, which will be controlled from the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, in southwestern Germany.
Mission controllers at the center "received a signal from the spacecraft indicating that its solar panels had successfully deployed," NASA announced in a statement.
Space Orbiter is equipped with 10 scientific instruments and weighs 1,800 kilograms (4,000 pounds). The joint project mission came at a cost of almost €1.5 billion ($1.66 billion). The journey could last up to nine years, and the probe will reach primary scientific orbit in two years.
The Space Orbiter launched from Cape Canaveral, FloridaImage: Reuters/S. Nesius
What's it doing?
Information from Space Orbiter is expected to provide insights into the sun's atmosphere, its winds and its magnetic fields, including how it shapes the heliosphere, the vast swath of space that encompasses our system.
"By the end of our Solar Orbiter mission, we will know more about the hidden force responsible for the sun's changing behavior and its influence on our home planet than ever before," said Günther Hasinger, the ESA's director of science. Hasinger added that this could provide useful information about how powerful solar storms could disrupt everyday life.
Out of this world: Scientists discover 300,000 new galaxies
Using the LOFAR radio telescope, astronomers have discovered hundreds of thousands of previously undetected galaxies. Scientists hope the find will allow them to learn more about black holes and how galaxy clusters form.
Image: LOFAR/Maya Horton
Red flickers
This montage shows several galaxies from the HETDEX region. More than 200 scientists from 18 countries discovered hundreds of thousands of galaxies that no human has ever seen before. The astronomers created the new map of the northern sky with the radio telescope network LOFAR (Low Frequency Array).
Image: LOFAR/Judith Croston
Fluorescent wings
The different colors in the radio source B3 0157+406 indicate the presence of large-scale turbulences in the source's magnetic field. Less scientific observers might see faces in the wing-shaped structures.
Image: LOFAR/Maya Horton
Spiral galaxy
This brightly colored tail belongs to spiral galaxy M106. Researchers believe the flame-looking structures are the result of activity from the galaxy's central supermassive black hole. "With LOFAR, we want to find out which influence black holes have on the galaxies in which they are located," said Marcus Brüggen, an astrophysicist at the University of Hamburg.
Image: LOFAR/Cyril Tasse
The 'Whirlpool Galaxy'
No, we did not make this nickname up! M51 is known as the "Whirlpool Galaxy" among LOFAR-astronomers, and it's not hard to see why. It's between 15 and 35 million light-years away from Earth and has a supermassive black hole at its center as well.
Image: LOFAR/Sean Mooney
The all-seeing red eye
This merging galaxy cluster goes by the snappy name of CIZA J2242.8+5301. Among astronomers it's known for its northern arch, dubbed the "Sausage." Researchers hope the new LOFAR data will also give them more information on how galaxy clusters evolve.
Image: LOFAR/Duy Hoang
Explosions in space
What you see here are supernova explosions in the spiral arms of galaxy IC 342. Pretty awesome, right? "This is a new window on the universe," said Cyril Tasse, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory who was involved in the LOFAR project, said about the newly discovered galaxies.
Image: LOFAR/Maya Horton
Glimmering stars
Even LOFAR astronomers will use some trickery to arrive at the most beautiful picture sometimes. For this glittering snapshot, they super-imposed LOFAR images of a galaxy on an optical photo of the night sky. We'd say the effort paid off.
Image: LOFAR/Cyril Tasse
'10 million DVDs'
The galaxy cluster Abell 1314 is located at a distance of approximately 460 million light-years away from Earth. LOFAR researchers will have mountains of data to look into from Abell 1314 and the roughly 300,000 other galaxies they have now discovered. "We have to work through the equivalent of 10 million DVDs," Dominik Schwarz from Bielefeld University in Germany said.
