ESA Science & Technology - News Archive
News archive
News archive
After completion of an independent review, a new launch date for the James Webb Space Telescope has been announced: 30 March 2021.
Published: 28 June 2018
An international team of astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope has made the most precise test of general relativity yet outside our Milky Way.
Published: 21 June 2018
After a nearly twenty-year long game of cosmic hide-and-seek, astronomers using ESA's XMM-Newton space observatory have finally found evidence of hot, diffuse gas permeating the cosmos, closing a puzzling gap in the overall budget of 'normal' matter in the Universe.
Published: 20 June 2018
ESA's XMM-Newton observatory has discovered the best-ever candidate for a very rare and elusive type of cosmic phenomenon: a medium-weight black hole in the process of tearing apart and feasting on a nearby star.
Published: 18 June 2018
ESA's XMM-Newton observations of a neutron star merger, obtained a few months after its discovery via gravitational waves, caught the moment when its X-ray emission stopped increasing, opening new questions about the nature of this peculiar source.
Published: 31 May 2018
Though it resembles a peaceful rose swirling in the darkness of the cosmos, NGC 3256 is actually the site of a violent clash. This distorted galaxy is the relic of a collision between two spiral galaxies, estimated to have occurred 500 million years ago.
Published: 31 May 2018
Using the unparalleled sharpness and ultraviolet observational capabilities of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, an international team of astronomers has created the most comprehensive high-resolution ultraviolet-light survey of star-forming galaxies in the local Universe. The catalogue contains about 8000 clusters and 39 million hot blue stars.
Published: 17 May 2018
A rare phenomenon connected to the death of a star has been discovered in observations made by ESA's Herschel space observatory: an unusual laser emission from the spectacular Ant Nebula, which suggests the presence of a double star system hidden at its heart.
Published: 16 May 2018
*Please note this event has been postponed until October. Revised details will be provided nearer the time*
Published: 14 May 2018
Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have detected helium in the atmosphere of the exoplanet WASP-107b. This is the first time this element has been detected in the atmosphere of a planet outside the Solar System.
Published: 2 May 2018
ESA's Gaia mission has produced the richest star catalogue to date, including high-precision measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars and revealing previously unseen details of our home Galaxy.
Published: 25 April 2018
Gaia's first data release was not designed to be a full database with which major scientific discoveries could be made. Instead it was foreseen much more as a set of test data that astronomers could practice on and get ready for the second release from ESA's billion-star surveyor – the one that would feature a billion parallaxes and proper...
Published: 20 April 2018
The first data release of ESA's Gaia satellite provided a surprising number of scientific results. Yet it is nothing but a tease for what is expected from the second data release, scheduled for 25 April.
Published: 20 April 2018
This colourful cloud of glowing interstellar gas is just a tiny part of the Lagoon Nebula, a vast stellar nursery. This nebula is a region full of intense activity, with fierce winds from hot stars, swirling chimneys of gas, and energetic star formation all embedded within a hazy labyrinth of gas and dust.
Published: 19 April 2018
Media representatives are invited to a briefing on the second data release of ESA's Gaia mission, an astrometry mission to map more than one billion stars in our Galaxy, the Milky Way. The media briefing is being organised by ESA at the ILA Berlin Air and Space Show in Germany, on Wednesday 25 April 2018.
Published: 19 April 2018
Astronomers using ESA's XMM-Newton space observatory have probed the gas-filled haloes around galaxies in a quest to find 'missing' matter thought to reside there, but have come up empty-handed – so where is it?
Published: 18 April 2018
The purpose of this Announcement of Opportunity (AO) is to solicit proposals for Community Scientists in the PLATO mission. This AO is open to scientists affiliated with institutes located in ESA Member States. Letters of Intent are due 26 April 2018, 12:00 (noon) CEST. The deadline for proposals is 23 May 2018, 12:00 (noon) CEST.
Published: 11 April 2018
As astronomers worldwide are preparing to explore the second data release of ESA's Gaia satellite, the Data Processing and Analysing Consortium announced just how many sources will be included in the new catalogue, which will be made public on 25 April.
Published: 5 April 2018
While charting the positions of more than a billion stars, ESA's Gaia mission provides all-important information even about the dark patches of the sky where fewer stars are observed. These images, based on Gaia's first data release, are an appetizer to the astronomical riches that will be unleashed with the mission's second release on 25 April.
Published: 3 April 2018
Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have found the most distant star ever discovered. The hot blue star existed only 4.4 billion years after the Big Bang. This discovery provides new insight into the formation and evolution of stars in the early Universe, the constituents of galaxy clusters and also on the nature of dark matter.
Published: 2 April 2018
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