ESA Science & Technology - News Archive

For the first time, astronomers have detected synchronised pulses of optical and X-ray radiation from a mysterious pulsar some 4500 light years away. The observations indicate that a new physical mechanism might be needed to explain the behaviour of fast-spinning sources like this one, known as transitional millisecond pulsars.

With data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, water vapour has been detected in the atmosphere of a super-Earth within the habitable zone by University College London (UCL) researchers in a world first.

ESA's X-ray space telescope XMM-Newton has detected never-before-seen periodic flares of X-ray radiation coming from a distant galaxy that could help explain some enigmatic behaviours of active black holes.

Just as people of the same age can vary greatly in appearance and shape, so do collections of stars or stellar aggregates. New observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope suggest that chronological age alone does not tell the complete story when it comes to the evolution of star clusters.

Rather than leaving home young, as expected, stellar 'siblings' prefer to stick together in long-lasting, string-like groups, finds a new study of data from ESA's Gaia spacecraft.

Proposals are solicited for observations with XMM-Newton in response to the nineteenth Announcement of Opportunity, AO-19, issued 20 August 2019. This AO covers the period May 2020 to April 2021 and is open to proposers from all over the world. The deadline for proposal submission is 11 October 2019, 12:00 UTC.

A major step towards the completion of the scientific payload on ESA's Euclid space mission has been completed, following the delivery of the detectors for the Near Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP) instrument.

What happens when two supermassive black holes collide? Combining the observing power of two future ESA missions, Athena and LISA, would allow us to study these cosmic clashes and their mysterious aftermath for the first time.