Science Highlights

SUMER: First view at the genuine Lyman-α profile February 2010 The hydrogen Lyman-α line outshines all other emission lines. It is the prime vehicle for radiative energy transport in the solar atmosphere. Blinded by its brightness, the SUMER instrument did not dare to look at it. Now, after 12 years of its operation, the SUMER team found a trick to observe it with 'twinkling eyes'. Such high-resolution observations - not hampered by geocoronal absorption - have never been completed before and ... [more]

STEREO: A New Dimension in Solar Research August 2006 The launch of the NASA STEREO mission is soon ahead, MPS involved On September 18 2006 NASA plans to launch two space probes in Cape Canaveral which will initiate a new area in solar research. The two almost identical space probes constitute NASA's Stereo mission. With support also from ESA, the probes have been developed and built in the Labs of the world's leading research institutes in solar science during the recent ... [more]

First observations with the ASPERA-4 experiment on Venus Express June 2006 Venus, the ’Morning Star’, is very similar to Earth in size, mass, density and volume, but evolved in a radically different way over the last four thousend million years. Its toxic and heavy atmosphere is made up almost entirely of carbon dioxide, clouds of sulphuric acid. Venus has a burning-hot surface temperature (≈ 750 K), and a high surface pressure (95 bar), compared to Earth (1 bar). Understanding why Venus became such an unfriendly ... [more]

Banana-doughnut tomography of the Sun May 2006 Finite-wavelength tomography of the Earth or the Sun critically relies on models of the sensitivity of seismic travel times to localized heterogeneities, as evidenced by the controversial discovery of plumes in the Earth's mantle. We have used time-distance helioseismology to directly measure the spatial sensitivity of surface-gravity wave travel times to magnetic perturbations. The data strongly speak in favour of 'banana-doughnut' theory ... [more]

Photospheric electric currents feed energy into the solar corona April 2006 The solar magnetic field is an important quantity which couples the solar interior with the photosphere and corona. Unfortunately we cannot measure the coronal magnetic field directly, but we have to extrapolate it from photospheric measurements. In the past this has been achieved mainly by the assumption that the coronal magnetic field as a potential field which ignores the influence of electric currents. Photospheric vector magnetograph ... [more]

20 years since the encounter of the Giotto space probe with comet Halley March 2006 Max Planck researches got spectacular results 20 years ago, on March 13 1986, the spacecraft Giotto encountered comet Halley. From the present point of view what were the most important results? Comet Halley is a relatively bright comet. When it is close to the Earth and Sun it usually can be observed with naked eye. It looks like a star with tail. From a star-like condensation a tail grows, which, if seen at a dark place ... [more]

A little moon of Saturn makes its presence known February 2006 The effects of plumes of ice and gas released from a small icy moon of Saturn can be detected over a million kilometers from the moon itself. The report, led by a team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, details how an instrument aboard the NASA/ESA >Cassini spacecraft has detected "holes" in the magnetosphere: a bubble of charged particles surrounding Saturn. These holes are ... [more]

Current systems of extrasolar planets January 2006 During the last decade astrophysicists made breakthrough discoveries of planets outside our solar system, the first in 1995 in around the solar-like star 51 Peg b (Mayor and Queloz, 1995). In the MPS in Lindau we investigated the properties of such planets in, maybe completely different worlds, where planets might be electrically connected to their Suns. [more]

Links between magnetic fields and plasma flows in a coronal hole April 2005 The coronal magnetic field is a key player in constraining plasma flow and guiding the nascent solar wind outflow. We compare the small-scale features visible in the Ne VIII Doppler-shift map of an equatorial coronal hole as observed by SUMER with the small-scale structures of the magnetic field as constructed from a simultaneous photospheric magnetogram by a potential magnetic-field extrapolation. [more]

Cluster Mission Extended February 2005 Four years after the start of its operations phase, the Cluster Mission has been extended an additional four years, to the end of 2009. This 4-spacecraft mission has made multi-point measurements of the plasma environment in all the important regions of the Earth's magnetosphere, at scales of a few hundred to several thousand kilometres. [more]

OSIRIS imaged the Orion Nebula M42 December 2004 In March 2004 ESA launched the Rosetta spacecraft. After a 10 year voyage it will reach comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014. On board is the scientific camera system OSIRIS. It consists of a Wide Angle Camera and a Narrow Angle Camera. On 28 September 2004 the Orion nebula was imaged during the in-flight calibration of the instrument. [more]

First images of a comet by the OSIRIS camera onboard ROSETTA August 2004 During the commissioning phase of ESA's ROSETTA mission, which was launched on 2nd March 2004 and will visit comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014, the camera OSIRIS has acquired first images of a comet. The comet 2002 T7 (LINEAR) was observed on 1 May 2004 from a distance of about 98 million kilometers. OSIRIS was built by a consortium lead by MPS. [more]