ESA Science & Technology - News Archive

Thanks to ESA's star mapping spacecraft Gaia and machine learning, astronomers have discovered 12 quasars whose light is so strongly deflected by foreground galaxies that they are each visible as four distinct images, called an 'Einstein cross'.

The motion of stars in the outskirts of our galaxy hints at significant changes in the history of the Milky Way. This and other equally fascinating results come from a set of papers that demonstrate the quality of ESA's Gaia Early third Data Release (EDR3), which is made public today.

The formation of the Sun, the Solar System and the subsequent emergence of life on Earth may be a consequence of a collision between our galaxy, the Milky Way, and a smaller galaxy called Sagittarius, discovered in the 1990s to be orbiting our galactic home.

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.

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.

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.

On 31 March 2017, Jupiter's moon Europa passed in front of a background star – a rare event that was captured for the first time by ground-based telescopes thanks to data provided by ESA's Gaia spacecraft.

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...