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| Michael Perryman awarded prestigious Tycho Brahe Prize |
| Professor Michael Perryman, the scientific leader of ESA's Hipparcos mission, and a founding father of its successor mission, Gaia, has been awarded the 2011 Tycho Brahe Prize from the European Astronomical Society. The prize recognises the extraordinary work accomplished by Perryman in shepherding the field of astrometry to its successful leap into space-based observations and demonstrating the importance of measuring stellar positions for a plethora of astronomical applications. |
| Date: 06 Jun 2011 |
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| A New Reduction of the Hipparcos Catalogues |
| ESA's Hipparcos mission provided astrometric data on thousands of stars. Thanks to advances in computational processing power it has been possible to revisit the original data and improve the accuracy of the derived catalogue. |
| Date: 27 Sep 2007 |
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| Reprint of Millennium Star Atlas |
| The Millennium Star Atlas is to be reprinted in a soft cover version. The Atlas contains 1548 sky charts, depicting the heavens with unprecedented information on the nature of our Galaxy using the stellar information drawn from ESA's Hipparcos and Tycho Catalogues. |
| Date: 21 Sep 2005 |
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| ESA's Hipparcos finds rebels with a cause |
| A team of European astronomers has discovered that many stars in the vicinity of the Sun have unusual motions caused by the spiral arms of our galaxy, the Milky Way. According to this research, based on data from ESA's Hipparcos observatory, our stellar neighbourhood is the crossroads of streams of stars coming from several directions. Some of the stars hosting planetary systems could be immigrants from more central regions of the Milky Way.
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| Date: 20 Oct 2004 |
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| The Digital Universe |
| In the late 1990's, the American Museum of Natural History and the Hayden Planetarium embarked on the Digital Galaxy Project, the goal of which was to build the most accurate Milky Way Galaxy that had ever been built based on astronomical observations. Among the many catalogues included in the Digital Galaxy are the Hipparcos Catalogue and the Tycho 2 Catalogue. After a few years the project expanded to consider objects beyond the Milky Way and it is now known as the Digital Universe. |
| Date: 28 May 2004 |
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| Ghosts found in space |
| For Halloween this year, watch out for some real ghosts cruising through space, destined never to 'cross over' to the other side. These ghosts are scientific satellites that have reached the end of their mission and experts have turned off all their instruments. Other satellites cross over into the Earth's atmosphere to be burned up on reentry, but these satellites will float on silently through the eerie darkness of space forever. |
| Date: 28 Oct 2002 |
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| A unique 3-D view of our Galaxy |
| Observers, and even the most powerful ground and space telescopes, see
celestial objects (stars and galaxies) in two dimensions. Today, at
ESTEC, the audience at the Space Science Department Colloquium "Our
Galaxy - in Three Dimensions" were treated to a unique
three-dimensional view of our Galaxy.
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| Date: 08 Feb 2001 |
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| Doubling the Hipparcos star count: the Tycho-2 Catalogue |
| The success of ESA's Hipparcos satellite in mapping many stars with amazing accuracy takes another stride this week. The Tycho-2 Catalogue, giving positions, motions, brightness and colours of 2 539 913 stars, more than doubles the number of stars in the original Tycho Catalogue.
Included are 99 per cent of all stars down to magnitude 11, which means almost 100 000 times fainter than the brightest star, Sirius. |
| Date: 11 Feb 2000 |
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| When Hipparcos saw the shadow of an alien planet |
| Astronomers have just realised that news of a planet orbiting a distant star came from ESA's Hipparcos satellite eight years ago, although no
one noticed it until now. The first observation, on 17 April 1991, was made long before Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the Observatoire de Genève astounded the world in 1995 with their discovery of a planet around the star 51 Pegasi. Since then the search for alien planets has become a highly competitive theme in astronomy, and the present tally of stars known to possess planets is 28. |
| Date: 14 Dec 1999 |
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| A Viking galaxy found by Hipparcos shows how the Milky Way grew |
| A dozen ancient stars, scattered all over the sky, are survivors from a
small galaxy that invaded the Milky Way like a shipload of Vikings. The
European Space Agency's Hipparcos satellite, which measured the motions
of many thousands of stars, enabled astronomers from Leiden in the Netherlands and Garching in Germany to make this astonishing discovery.
It provides clear evidence in favour of the theory that great assemblies
of stars, like the Milky Way Galaxy where we live, grew by the
amalgamation of smaller galaxies.
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| Date: 05 Nov 1999 |
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| A daytime view of Mercury and the stars |
| During the total eclipse of the Sun on 11 August, the sky will be dark
and some bright stars should be easy to see. Avert your eyes for a
moment from the glories of the solar atmosphere, and you can glimpse the
planet Mercury, a newly fashionable target for space exploration. |
| Date: 05 Aug 1999 |
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| ESA introduces its Director of Science Medal |
| Extraordinary efforts made by individuals who take part in ESA's scientific missions are now to be recognized by a special ESA award called the Director of
Science Medal. At a ceremony in Bern, Switzerland, on 19 May 1999, the
first four medals were presented to "stars" of the Hipparcos mission,
Catherine Turon and Jean Kovalevsky from France, Lennart Lindegren from
Sweden and Erik Høg from Denmark. |
| Date: 19 May 1999 |
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| ESA's Hipparcos project scientist to give George Darwin lecture |
| This year's UK Royal Astronomical Society George Darwin Lecture
will be given by Dr Michael Perryman, Astrophysics Division, ESTEC, on 'A Stereoscopic View of our Galaxy'.
On Friday 14 May, the Royal Astronomical Society will hold their
179th Annual General Meeting at the Scientific Societies Lecture Theatre,
in Savile Row, London. The annual George Darwin Lecture, established
in 1927, covers all fields of astronomy excluding planetary science,
and preference is given to a lecturer normally resident outside the UK.
This year's lecturer is Dr Michael Perryman, from ESA's Space Science
Department, known for his work as Hipparcos Project Scientist
between 1981 and 1997. He will talk on the scientific results from the
Hipparcos mission, and will use a series of novel three-dimensional
stereo images of star fields to illustrate his talk.
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| Date: 10 May 1999 |
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| ESA's plans for a microarcsec space astrometry mission being presented at the Gaia workshop |
| This week plans for the Gaia space astrometry mission will be
presented to more than 70 scientists from all over Europe when they
gather in Leiden (Netherlands) for the Gaia workshop.
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| Date: 23 Nov 1998 |
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| Recent reviews on Hipparcos results |
| For recent reviews on the age of the Universe, distances to Globular Clusters & the Large
Magellanic Cloud and the RR Lyrae distance scale see the Scientific Results page.
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| Date: 15 Sep 1998 |
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| Hipparcos catalogue available on-line |
| The most accurate and comprehensive stellar catalogues ever produced, the Hipparcos and Tycho Catalogues, were published in June 1997. Since June 1997 professional and amateur astronomers have been able to make use of this enormously rich resource on line. |
| Date: 20 Jul 1998 |
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| PR 08-1998: Hipparcos reveals that the Milky Way is changing shape |
| Data of exceptional accuracy, from ESA's star-mapping satellite Hipparcos, show that distant stars are
moving in unexpected directions. Their strange behaviour could mean that the shape of the Milky Way Galaxy is changing. A
team of astronomers from Turin Observatory and Oxford University announced the discovery in the 2 April issue of the
London science journal Nature.
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| Date: 01 Apr 1998 |
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| INFO 04-1998: Hipparcos makes an accurate 3-D chart of an important star cluster |
| A landmark result in the science of the stars comes with a complete and accurate description of the Hyades cluster of more than 200 stars, from measurements by the European Space Agency's star-mapping satellite Hipparcos. With the distance to this historically important tribe of stars now known to better than 1 per cent, theories of the evolution of stars are put on a secure basis at last. |
| Date: 19 Feb 1998 |
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| INFO 01-1998: Hipparcos pinpoints an amazing gamma-ray clock |
| The position in the sky of the "silent" neutron star Geminga is now known to within about 10 millionths of a degree (0.04 arc-second) thanks to results from ESA's Hipparcos star-fixing satellite combined with observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope. Geminga emits pulses of gamma rays like a ticking clock, but its apparent rate changes because of the Earth's motion in orbit around the Sun. Using the Hipparcos position to correct this effect, astronomers have made a continuous reckoning of some 3 200 000 000 pulses in the gamma-rays emitted by Geminga, going back to observations by NASA's SAS-2 and ESA's COS-B gamma-ray satellites in the 1970s. |
| Date: 05 Jan 1998 |
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| INFO 14-1997: The impact of Hipparcos star-fixing extends to life's evolution |
| To find anything to rival the new results on star positions and motions from the Hipparcos satellite, the European Space Agency's director of science has to look back 400 years. Commenting on the Hipparcos Symposium which commences in Venice on 13 May, Roger Bonnet compares it to astronomy in Denmark at the end of the 16th Century. |
| Date: 12 May 1997 |
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