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While ESA’s Integral was observing the sky, it suddenly spotted a burst of gamma-rays coming from the nearby galaxy M82. Only a few hours later, ESA’s XMM-Newton searched for an afterglow from the explosion but found none. Astronomers realised that the burst must have been an extra-galactic flare from a magnetar, a young neutron star […]
Have you ever looked up at the night sky and wondered if there are other planets out there beyond our Solar System? To source
An ESA programme called Prodex has enabled Estonian researchers and industry to join an international mission to intercept and examine a comet entering the inner Solar System for the first time. To source
Image: Total solar eclipse 8 April 2024 To source
Video: 00:00:31 ESA’s Proba-2 captured two partial solar eclipses on 8 April 2024. A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun, totally or partially blocking the Sun from Earth’s point of view. On 8 April, lucky viewers across North America witnessed the Moon blocking out the Sun in its entirety […]
Image: The Euclid mission team was awarded this year’s Space Achievement Award by the Space Foundation , a non-profit organisation founded in 1983 to foster collaboration across the global space community. ESA Director General, Josef Aschbacher (centre), and ESA Director of Science, Carole Mundell (right), collected the prize at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, […]
The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has set its sights on the starburst galaxy Messier 82 (M82), a small but mighty environment that features rapid star formation. By looking closer with Webb’s sensitive infrared capabilities, a team of scientists is getting to the very core of the galaxy, gaining a better understanding of how it […]
ESA’s Mars Express recently looped around Mars for the 25 000th time – and the orbiter has captured yet another spectacular view of the Red Planet to mark the occasion. To source
A newly devised procedure to de-ice Euclid‘s optics has performed significantly better than hoped. Light coming in to the visible ‘VIS’ instrument from distant stars was gradually decreasing due small amounts of water ice building up on its optics. Mission teams spent months devising a procedure to heat up individual mirrors in the instrument’s complex […]
Image: Photo of auroral spiral To source
ESA’s Gaia space telescope has further disentangled the history of our galaxy, discovering two surprising streams of stars that formed and wove together over 12 billion years ago. To source
Webb measurements shed new light on a decade-long mystery. The rate at which the Universe is expanding, known as the Hubble constant, is one of the fundamental parameters for understanding the evolution and ultimate fate of the cosmos. However, a persistent difference, called the Hubble Tension, is seen between the value of the constant measured […]
One of the key missions of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope is to probe the early Universe. Now, the unmatched resolution and sensitivity of Webb’s NIRCam instrument have revealed, for the first time, what lies in the local environment of galaxies in the very early Universe. This has solved one of the most puzzling […]