ESA Science & Technology - News Archive

The behaviour of one of nature's humblest creatures and archival data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope are helping astronomers probe the largest structures in the Universe.

Astronomers have pondered for years why our galaxy, the Milky Way, is warped. Data from ESA's star-mapping satellite Gaia suggest the distortion might be caused by an ongoing collision with another, smaller, galaxy, which sends ripples through the galactic disc like a rock thrown into water.

Proposals are solicited for observations with INTEGRAL in response to the Eighteenth Announcement of Opportunity, AO-18, issued 2 March 2020. This AO covers the period January to December 2021. The deadline for proposals has been postponed to 4 May, 14:00 CEST.

A star of about eight percent the Sun's mass has been caught emitting an enormous 'super flare' of X-rays – a dramatic high-energy eruption that poses a fundamental problem for astronomers, who did not think it possible on stars that small.

Six weeks after the launch of CHEOPS, ESA's Characterising Exoplanet Satellite, the telescope cover was opened as part of the mission's in-orbit commissioning.

A 500-day global observation campaign spearheaded more than three years ago by ESA’s galaxy-mapping powerhouse Gaia has provided unprecedented insights into the binary system of stars that caused an unusual brightening of an even more distant star.

Material falling into a black hole casts X-rays out into space – and now, for the first time, ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory has used the reverberating echoes of this radiation to map the dynamic behaviour and surroundings of a black hole itself.

ESA's XMM-Newton has discovered that gas lurking within the Milky Way's halo reaches far hotter temperatures than previously thought and has a different chemical make-up than predicted, challenging our understanding of our galactic home.

ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory has spied hot gas sloshing around within a galaxy cluster – a never-before-seen behaviour that may be driven by turbulent merger events.

The science instrument on ESA's Characterising Exoplanet Satellite, CHEOPS, was successfully activated on 8 January, marking the beginning of the mission's in-orbit commissioning.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has imaged the majestic spiral galaxy UGC 2885, which may be the largest known in the local universe. It is 2.5 times wider than our Milky Way and contains 10 times as many stars.

ESA's CHEOPS mission lifted off on a Soyuz-Fregat launcher from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, at 09:54:20 CET on 18 December on its exciting mission to characterise planets orbiting stars other than the Sun.

On 10 December 1999, as XMM-Newton launched from Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, no one was expecting that the mission would last for two decades.

During its 20 years in space, ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory has made many exciting discoveries. But no one could have predicted that the very first observation of the spacecraft would be one of its most important.

ESA's X-ray observatory, XMM-Newton, has now spent 20 years in orbit. In those two decades it has made many scientific breakthroughs, helping bring X-ray astronomy into the main stream of astronomical investigation.

New observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have investigated the nature of the gamma-ray burst GRB 190114C.

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have observed a galaxy in the distant regions of the Universe which appears duplicated at least 12 times on the night sky. This unique sight, created by strong gravitational lensing, helps astronomers get a better understanding of the cosmic era known as the epoch of reionisation.

In celebration of Halloween, this new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures two galaxies of equal size in a collision that appears to resemble a ghostly face. This observation was made on 19 June 2019 in visible light by the telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys.

ESA congratulates 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics laureates Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, who have been awarded the prestigious prize for the first discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star, and James Peebles, honoured for the theoretical framework of cosmology used to investigate the Universe on its largest scales.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has produced a new resource for astronomers: the Hubble Catalog of Variables (HCV), which is the first full, homogeneous catalogue of variable sources based on archival data from the iconic observatory.