ESA Science & Technology - XMM-Newton

8 April 2020

Astronomers have assumed for decades that the Universe is expanding at the same rate in all directions. A new study based on data from ESA's XMM-Newton, NASA's Chandra and the German-led ROSAT X-ray observatories suggests this key premise of cosmology might be wrong.

20 February 2020

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.

20 January 2020

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.

16 January 2020

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.

10 January 2020

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.

9 December 2019

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.

9 December 2019

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.

9 December 2019

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.

27 August 2019The Solar wind-Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Link Explorer (SMILE) mission is still four years away from launch, but scientists are already using existing ESA satellites, such as the XMM-Newton X-ray observatory and the Cluster mission studying Earth's magnetosphere, to pave the way for this pioneering venture.