27 April
2001: On 27 April 2001, scientists announced that the ESA/NASA SOHO spacecraft could now detect activity on the far side of the Sun.Teams in France and the USA used SOHO’s ...
27 FEB. 2004
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1900: On 28 April 1900, Dutch astronomer Jan Oort was born.
By the time of his death, at the age of 92, Professor Oort was recognised as one of the greatest astronomers of the 20th century.
He is best known for his suggestion that the Solar System is surrounded by a vast cloud of perhaps 100 000 million comets. By studying the orbits of long-period comets, Oort noticed that many of them seem to originate in a zone far beyond the orbit of Pluto.
Although he was not the first astronomer to propose such a comet swarm, the as-yet unconfirmed cloud is usually known as the ‘Oort Cloud’.
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26 April
1994: On 26 April 1994, an image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (HST) revealed the faint host galaxy of a quasar. The wealth of new detail in the image ...
25 April
2002: On 25 April 2002, an ESA astronaut was launched to the International Space Station (ISS) when the 'Marco Polo' flight and its crew of three lifted off from Baikonur, ...
24 April
1990: On 24 April 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched. It is a collaboration between ESA and NASA and is a long-term, space-based observatory. The observations are carried out ...
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