Season‘s Greetings

Following the landing of the balloon-borne solar observatory Sunrise III in the Canadian Northwest Territories, the recovery team has now reached the landing site. Sunrise III has touched down in a wooded area and, at first glance, appears to be in good condition. The data storage units containing the scientific data have already been recovered. The first raw data looks extremely promising.

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After almost one and a half years of traveling through space, ESA’s space probe JUICE is due to pay a visit home at the beginning of next week: In order to adjust its speed and course on its way to Jupiter, the space probe will first fly close to the Moon and then to Earth on Monday and Tuesday, August 19 and 20, 2024. This is the first time that a space probe has attempted a maneuver of this kind. The scientific and technical teams at the MPS have been preparing for this event for months.

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Stars similar to the Sun produce a gigantic outburst of radiation on average about once every hundred years per star. Such superflares release more energy than a trillion hydrogen bombs and make all previously recorded solar flares pale in comparison. This estimate is based on an inventory of 56450 sun-like stars, which an international team of researchers led by the MPS presents in the journal Science. It shows that previous studies have significantly underestimated the eruptive potential of these stars.

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New images of the Sun’s visible surface show the entire solar disk in unprecedented detail. They were created by researchers from the MPS from observational data obtained by Solar Orbiter’s Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) from March 22 of last year. Simultaneously captured observations of the hot corona, recorded by Solar Orbiter's Extreme-Ultraviolet Imager (EUI), make it possible to understand where and how the sometimes temperamental processes of the Sun's atmosphere occur.

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Asteroid Ryugu possibly did not travel as far from its place of origin to its current near-Earth orbit as previously assumed. New research suggests that Ryugu was formed near Jupiter. Earlier studies had pointed to an origin beyond the orbit of Saturn. Four years ago, the Japanese space probe Hayabusa 2 brought samples of Ryugu back to Earth. Researchers led by the MPS have now compared which types of nickel are found in these samples as well as in typical carbon-rich meteorites.
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Around four weeks after the successful Moon and Earth flyby of ESA’s space probe JUICE, the scientific and technical teams at the MPS have analyzed the first observational data from their two instruments on board. The data not only reveal that both SWI and PEP-JEI are functioning as expected. The results also invite a kind of cosmic control experiment: What could an extraterrestrial space probe, equipped like JUICE and with no prior knowledge of Earth and its inhabitants, find out about our planet? more

The extremely thin atmosphere that surrounds the moon is primarily created by the constant bombardment of the lunar surface by dust-sized mini-meteorites. Other processes, such as the interaction with particles and radiation from the Sun, play a subordinate role, as researchers from the University of Chicago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the MPS and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center report in the journal Science Advances.

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The balloon-borne solar observatory Sunrise III has embarked on its research flight: at 6.24 AM (CEST) this morning, the observatory lifted off safely from Esrange Space Center near the small town of Kiruna in northern Sweden. Carried by a giant helium balloon, the stratospheric flight of several days now leads westwards along the Arctic Circle across the Atlantic to Canada. more

A star’s magnetic field must be considered in order to correctly determine the characteristics of their exoplanets from observations. This is demonstrated by new model calculations presented in the journal Nature Astronomy by a MPS-led research group. The researchers show that the distribution of the star’s brightness over its disk depends on the star’s level of magnetic activity. This, in turn, affects the signature of an exoplanet in observational data.
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The interior of the Sun does not rotate at the same rate at all latitudes. The physical origin of this differential rotation is not fully understood. A team of MPS scientists has made a ground-breaking discovery. As the team reports in the journal Science Advances, the long-period solar oscillations discovered by MPS scientists in 2021 play a crucial role in controlling the Sun’s rotational pattern. more