ESA Science & Technology - News Archive

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.

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.

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.