ESA Science & Technology - News Archive

Observations by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile have found that something may be missing from the theories of how dark matter behaves.

Proposals are solicited for observations with XMM-Newton in response to the twentieth Announcement of Opportunity, AO-20, issued 18 August 2020. This AO covers the period May 2021 to April 2022 and is open to proposers from all over the world. The deadline for proposal submission is 9 October 2020, 12:00 UTC.

New observations by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope suggest that the unexpected dimming of the supergiant star Betelgeuse was most likely caused by an immense amount of hot material ejected into space, forming a dust cloud that blocked starlight coming from Betelgeuse's surface.

A global collaboration of telescopes including ESA's INTEGRAL high-energy space observatory has detected a unique mix of radiation bursting from a dead star in our galaxy – something that has never been seen before in this type of star, and may solve a long-standing cosmic mystery.

Proposals are invited for the CHEOPS Discretionary Programme, an element of the Guest Observers Programme which enables scientists to propose observations of individual targets that have been discovered, or declared to be of high scientific merit, since the close of AO-1 back in mid-May 2019.

The launch of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (Webb) on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana is now planned for 31 October 2021.

ESA's Euclid mission has reached another milestone on its journey towards launch. Its two instruments are now built and fully tested. These have been delivered to Airbus Defence and Space in Toulouse, France, where they are now being integrated with the telescope to form the mission's payload module.

The young star HBC 672 is known by its nickname of Bat Shadow because of its wing-like shadow feature. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has now observed a curious "flapping" motion in the shadow of the star's disc for the first time.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope demonstrates its full range of imaging capabilities with two new images of planetary nebulae. The images depict two nearby young planetary nebulae, NGC 6302, dubbed the Butterfly Nebula, and NGC 7027.

An observation campaign led by ESA's XMM-Newton space observatory reveals the youngest pulsar ever seen – the remnant of a once-massive star – that is also a 'magnetar', sporting a magnetic field some 70 quadrillion times stronger than that of the Earth. ​

ESA's world-leading interactive celestial atlas, ESASky, has now been translated into Mandarin. Alongside its English and Spanish language versions, this makes ESASky available to an ever growing community of professional and amateur astronomers worldwide. ​​​​​​​

New results from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope suggest the formation of the first stars and galaxies in the early Universe took place sooner than previously thought.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope was used to conduct a three-year study of the crowded, massive and young star cluster Westerlund 2. This is the first time that astronomers have analysed an extremely dense star cluster to study which environments are favourable to planet formation.

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.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s iconic images and scientific breakthroughs have redefined our view of the Universe. To commemorate three decades of scientific discoveries, this image is one of the most photogenic examples of the many turbulent stellar nurseries the telescope has observed during its 30-year lifetime.

What astronomers thought was a planet beyond our solar system, has now seemingly vanished from sight. Astronomers now suggest that a full-grown planet never existed in the first place.

CHEOPS, ESA's new exoplanet mission, has successfully completed its almost three months of in-orbit commissioning, exceeding expectations for its performance.

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.

New data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have provided the strongest evidence yet for mid-sized black holes in the Universe. Hubble confirms that this "intermediate-mass" black hole dwells inside a dense star cluster.

This scene of stellar creation, captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, sits near the outskirts of the famous Tarantula Nebula. This cloud of gas and dust, as well as the many young and massive stars surrounding it, is the perfect laboratory to study the origin of massive stars.