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75 million kilometres: That’s how close ESA’s Solar Orbiter was to the Sun when it took this image in 2022. Captured at a resolution of more than 83 million pixels, it shows our star in unprecedented detail. The outermost part of the Sun’s atmosphere, the corona, reaches a temperature of around 1 million degrees Celsius – and no spacecraft has ever ventured so close as the Solar Orbiter. Over the course of two decades, ETH physics professor Louise Harra was involved in every phase of the project. (Image: ESA & NASA / Solar Orbiter / EUI team; data processing: E. Kraaikamp (ROB))
Cosmic dust, though present throughout space, remains one of the universe’s most enigmatic materials. At ETH Zurich, research group leader and ERC grant recipient Veerle Sterken is unlocking the secrets of these microscopic building blocks of stars and planets. Combining computer simulations, laboratory investigations and in situ measurement data from space missions, her team seeks to deepen our understanding of our solar system and its immediate interstellar neighbourhood. Fortunately, we don’t need to journey into space to admire clouds of cosmic dust – they’re visible to the naked eye in our Milky Way. (Image: Nicole W?chter)
An international team led by Anna Mittelholz and Simon St?hler is currently investigating the use of a robot to explore the Moon on future lunar missions. Developed at the Robotics Systems Lab and based on ETH’s SpaceHopper, the 10-kilogram LunarLeaper is equipped with geophysical instruments and cameras that will enable it to search for what may be volcanic cave systems under the surface of the Moon. (Image: Marco Tempest / ETH Zurich)
Asteroids are relics of our solar system’s origin, remnants of the process by which pieces of rock were formed from gas and dust 4.5 billion years ago. Some of these fragments coalesced into planets; others continue to orbit the Sun as asteroids. Occasionally, one of these reaches Earth as a meteorite, offering a precious resource to scientists. A research team led by Professor Maria Sch?nb?chler, a cosmochemist at ETH, has analysed metallic asteroid cores as part of PlanetS, one of Switzerland’s National Centres of Competence in Research. These findings offer important insights into the history of our solar system. (Image: Tobias Stierli, flaeck / PlanetS)
The Orion Nebula – a vast cloud of dust and gas where new stars are born – is just one of the many cosmic mysteries that mathematics professor Svitlana Mayboroda seeks to unravel. Despite the unprecedented processing power of modern computers, fully comprehending how the universe works remains a challenge. Rather than relying on complex computational formulas, Mayboroda develops mathematical theories that enable precise measurements and a deeper under?standing of cosmic phenomena. (Image: NASA, ESA, CSA / Science leads and image processing: M. McCaughrean, S. Pearson, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)
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