ESA Science & Technology - News Archive
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News archive
Nestled within this field of bright foreground stars lies ESO 495-21, a tiny galaxy with a big heart. ESO 495-21 may be just 3000 light-years across, but that is not stopping the galaxy from furiously forming huge numbers of stars. It may also host a supermassive black hole; this is unusual for a galaxy of its size, and may provide intriguing...
Published: 13 June 2019
Scientists in the Euclid Consortium have selected three extremely dark patches of the sky that will be the subject of the mission's deepest observations, aiming at exploring faint and rare objects in the Universe. The position of the Euclid Deep Fields – one in the northern sky and two in the southern sky – was announced last week, during the...
Published: 12 June 2019
Through this Announcement of Opportunity the European Space Agency solicits proposals for membership of the Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) Mission Science Board, a high-level team of scientists responsible for the overall science management of the MMX mission. Deadline for receipt of proposals: 20 August 2019, 12:00 (noon) CEST.
Published: 11 June 2019
ESA's Planck satellite has found no new evidence for the puzzling cosmic anomalies that appeared in its temperature map of the Universe. The latest study does not rule out the potential relevance of the anomalies but they do mean astronomers must work even harder to understand the origin of these puzzling features.
Published: 6 June 2019
What happens when two supermassive black holes collide? Combining the observing power of two future ESA missions, Athena and LISA, would allow us to study these cosmic clashes and their mysterious aftermath for the first time.
Published: 23 May 2019
ESA's Gaia mission has been busy mapping our Milky Way galaxy since 2014, and just over one year ago released its second batch of data on more than one billion stars. Since then, astronomers have been exploring this catalogue to reveal a huge amount of new information about the cosmos. One type of object that has seen an abundance of new...
Published: 17 May 2019
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken a new look at the spectacular irregular galaxy NGC 4485, which has been warped and wound by its larger galactic neighbour.
Published: 16 May 2019
One has a thick poisonous atmosphere, one has hardly any atmosphere at all, and one is just right for life to flourish – but it wasn't always that way. The atmospheres of our two neighbours Venus and Mars can teach us a lot about the past and future scenarios for our own planet.
Published: 13 May 2019
This Announcement of Opportunity solicits the participation of the scientific community as Interdisciplinary Scientists or Guest Investigators in the BepiColombo mission, to augment the scientific return of the mission as a whole. The deadline for Letters of Intent is 13 June 2019, and the deadline for proposals is 15 July 2019.
Published: 13 May 2019
Astronomers developed a mosaic of the distant Universe that documents 16 years of observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The image, called the Hubble Legacy Field, contains roughly 265 000 galaxies that stretch back to just 500 million years after the Big Bang.
Published: 2 May 2019
While ESA's Gaia mission has been surveying more than one billion stars from space, astronomers have been regularly monitoring the satellite's position in the sky with telescopes across the world, including the European Southern Observatory in Chile, to further refine Gaia's orbit and ultimately improve the accuracy of its stellar census.
Published: 2 May 2019
Data from ESA's INTEGRAL high-energy observatory have helped shed light on the workings of a mysterious black hole found spitting out 'bullets' of plasma while rotating through space.
Published: 29 April 2019
Hubble's measurements of today's expansion rate do not match the rate that was expected based on how the Universe appeared shortly after the Big Bang over 13 billion years ago. Using new data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have significantly lowered the possibility that this discrepancy is a fluke.
Published: 25 April 2019
This incredible image of the hourglass-shaped Southern Crab Nebula was taken to mark the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope's 29th anniversary in space. The nebula, created by a binary star system, is one of the many objects that Hubble has demystified throughout its productive life.
Published: 18 April 2019
Scientists have used the tiny distortions imprinted on the cosmic microwave background by the gravity of matter throughout the Universe, recorded by ESA's Planck satellite, to uncover the connection between the luminosity of quasars – the bright cores of active galaxies – and the mass of the much larger 'halos' of dark matter in which they sit.
Published: 17 April 2019
This 5th Announcement of Opportunity (AO), open to scientists affiliated with institutes located in ESA Member States, solicits proposals for participation as Science Planners in the NASA-led IRIS mission. The deadline for proposals is 15 May 2019, 12:00 (noon) CEST.
Published: 15 April 2019
The first batch of charge-coupled devices, or CCDs, to be flown on ESA's PLATO space observatory was accepted by ESA last month. This is an important milestone on the road to creating a groundbreaking spacecraft that will detect Earth-sized exoplanets in orbit around nearby stars.
Published: 11 April 2019
Following a series of tests conducted in space over the past five months, the ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission has successfully completed its near-Earth commissioning phase and is now ready for the operations that will take place during the cruise and, eventually, for its scientific investigations at Mercury.
Published: 5 April 2019
ESA's JUpiter ICy moons Explorer, JUICE, has been given the green light for full development after its critical design review was successfully concluded on 4 March. This major milestone marks the beginning of the qualification and production phase, taking this flagship mission one key step closer to starting its long journey to Jupiter in 2022.
Published: 3 April 2019
A reanalysis of data collected by ESA's Mars Express during the first 20 months of NASA's Curiosity mission found one case of correlated methane detection, the first time an in-situ measurement has been independently confirmed from orbit.
Published: 1 April 2019
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