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ESA Top News

The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
ESA Top News
ESA Top News

ESA Top News

August 17th, 2023 11:24:00 EDT -0400 Huginn - leading the Space Station

Huginn - leading the Space Station

Huginn

June 13th, 2023 04:17:00 EDT -0400 Space awaits you! More ESA vacancies open for applications
Space awaits you!

In March, we announced that 2023 would see the publication of over 300 vacancies at ESA. New vacancies keep being published as we continue our search for talented and motivated professionals to join our teams across Europe and support our mission of the peaceful exploration of space for the benefit of everyone. Could ESA be the next step in your career? Read more to find out!

March 18th, 2024 10:00:00 EDT -0400 Gaia maps largest ever collection of quasars in space and time
Image:

Astronomers have created the largest yet cosmic 3D map of quasars: bright and active centres of galaxies powered by supermassive black holes. This map shows the location of about 1.3 million quasars in space and time, with the furthest shining bright when the Universe was only 1.5 billion years old.

The new map has been made with data from ESA’s Gaia space telescope. While Gaia’s main objective is to map the stars in our own galaxy, in the process of scanning the sky it also spots objects outside the Milky Way, such as quasars and other galaxies.

The graphic representation of the map (bottom right on the infographic) shows us the location of quasars from our vantage point, the centre of the sphere. The regions empty of quasars are where the disc of our galaxy blocks our view.

Quasars are powered by supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies and can be hundreds of times as bright as an entire galaxy. As the black hole’s gravitational pull spins up nearby gas, the process generates an extremely bright disk, and sometimes jets of light, that telescopes can observe.

The galaxies that quasars live in sit inside massive clouds of invisible dark matter. The distribution of dark matter gives insight into how much dark matter there is in the Universe, and how strong it clusters. Astronomers compare these measurements across cosmic time to test our current model of the Universe's composition and evolution.

Because quasars are so bright, astronomers use them to map out the dark matter in the very distant Universe, and fill in the timeline of how the cosmos evolved.

For example, scientists have already compared the new quasar map with the cosmic microwave background, a snapshot of the oldest light in our cosmos. As this light travels to us, it is bent by the intervening web of dark matter – the same web mapped out by the quasars – and by comparing the two, scientists can measure how strongly matter clumps together through time.

This map was made by Kate Storey-Fisher of the Donostia International Physics Center in Spain and the New York University, USA, and colleagues, and published in the Astrophysical Journal. It uses data from Gaia’s third data release, which contained 6.6 million quasar candidates, as well as data from NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Combining the datasets helped clean Gaia’s original dataset of contaminants such as stars and galaxies, and better pinpoint the distances to the quasars. The team also created a map of where dust, stars and other phenomena are expected to block our view of some quasars, which is critical for interpreting the quasar map.

March 15th, 2024 10:14:00 EDT -0400 Week in images: 11-15 March 2024
Webb’s views of NGC 604

Week in images: 11-15 March 2024

Discover our week through the lens

March 15th, 2024 09:07:00 EDT -0400 Laser light sabre
Laser light sabre Image: Laser light sabre
March 14th, 2024 11:00:00 EDT -0400 Taking Earth’s temperature from space
Video: 00:14:13

Climate change exacerbates droughts by making them more frequent, longer, and more severe. This can have a wide range of impacts on the environment, agriculture, ecosystems and communities including water scarcity, crop failure and food shortages.

The upcoming Copernicus Land Surface Temperature Monitoring, LSTM, mission will improve sustainable agricultural productivity in a world of increasing water scarcity and variability.

The mission will carry a high spatial-temporal resolution thermal infrared sensor to provide observations of land-surface temperature.

These data are key to understand and respond to climate variability, manage water resources for agricultural production, predict droughts and also to address land degradation.

LSTM is one of six Copernicus Sentinel Expansion missions that ESA is developing on behalf of the EU. The missions will expand the current capabilities of the Copernicus Space Component – the world’s biggest supplier of Earth observation data.

This video features interviews with Ana Bolea Alamanac, LSTM Mission Project Manager, Ilias Manolis, LSTM Mission Payload Manager and Itziar Barat, LSTM Mission System and Operations Manager.

Access all "Unpacking Sentinels" videos.

March 14th, 2024 10:00:00 EDT -0400 Flying first on Ariane 6
Ariane 62 artist's impression
March 14th, 2024 08:59:00 EDT -0400 Shoebox-sized Milani CubeSat joining Hera asteroid mission
Milani CubeSat deployed from Hera asteroid mission

The shoebox-sized Milani CubeSat, which will perform close-up mineral prospecting of the Dimorphos asteroid, is ready for delivery to ESA’s Hera asteroid mission for planetary defence. The spacecraft will carry Milani and a second CubeSat, the Juventas radar imaging spacecraft for probing into the target asteroid, which together will be ESA’s first CubeSats to operate in deep space.

March 14th, 2024 05:00:00 EDT -0400 Arctic Weather Satellite tested for life in orbit
Fixing the Arctic Weather Satellite to the shaker

ESA’s Arctic Weather Satellite has passed its environmental test campaign with flying colours – meaning that the satellite has been declared fit for liftoff and its life in the harsh environment of space.

This new satellite, which is slated for launch in June, has been designed to show how it can improve weather forecasts in the Arctic – a region that currently lacks data for accurate short-term forecasts.