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ESA Space Science News

The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europes gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europes
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ESA Space Science
ESA Space Science

ESA Space Science

March 15th, 2024 09:07:00 EDT -0400 Laser light sabre
Laser light sabre Image: Laser light sabre
March 11th, 2024 10:00:00 EDT -0400 Webb & Hubble confirm Universe’s expansion rate
NGC 5468 – Cepheid host galaxy

Webb measurements shed new light on a decade-long mystery.

The rate at which the Universe is expanding, known as the Hubble constant, is one of the fundamental parameters for understanding the evolution and ultimate fate of the cosmos. However, a persistent difference, called the Hubble Tension, is seen between the value of the constant measured with a wide range of independent distance indicators and its value predicted from the afterglow of the Big Bang. The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has confirmed that the Hubble Space Telescope’s keen eye was right all along, erasing any lingering doubt about Hubble’s measurements.

March 4th, 2024 10:00:00 EST -0500 Webb unlocks secrets of primeval galaxy

Looking deep into space and time, two teams using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope have studied the exceptionally luminous galaxy GN-z11, which existed when our 13.8 billion-year-old Universe was only about 430 million years old.

February 28th, 2024 11:00:00 EST -0500 Webb finds dwarf galaxies reionised the Universe

Using the unprecedented capabilities of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, an international team of scientists has obtained the first spectroscopic observations of the faintest galaxies during the first billion years of the Universe. These findings help answer a longstanding question for astronomers: what sources caused the reionisation of the Universe? 

February 28th, 2024 04:18:00 EST -0500 Sand dunes meet stacked ice at Mars’s north pole
Sand dunes meet stacked ice at Mars’s north pole

ESA’s Mars Express has captured an intriguing view near Mars’s north pole, imaging where vast sand dunes meet the many layers of dusty ice covering the planet’s pole.

February 22nd, 2024 14:00:00 EST -0500 Webb finds clues of neutron star at heart of supernova remnant

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has found the best evidence yet for emission from a neutron star at the site of a recently observed supernova. The supernova, known as SN 1987A, occurred 160 000 light-years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud. SN 1987A was observed on Earth in 1987, the first supernova that was visible to the naked eye since 1604 — before the advent of telescopes.

February 13th, 2024 04:15:00 EST -0500 Sun's surprising activity surge in Solar Orbiter snapshot
Image:

See how the Sun changed between February 2021 and October 2023. As the Sun approaches the maximum in its magnetic activity cycle, we see more brilliant explosions, dark sunspots, loops of plasma, and swirls of super-hot gas.

The Sun goes through a cycle of activity that lasts around 11 years. It is caused by the ‘solar dynamo’, the process that generates the Sun’s magnetic field. At the beginning of this cycle (the solar minimum) there is relatively little activity and few sunspots. Activity steadily increases until it peaks (the solar maximum) and then decreases again to a minimum.

The most recent solar minimum was in December 2019, just two months before Solar Orbiter launched. The spacecraft’s early views (left) showed that in February 2021 the Sun was still relatively calm.

We are now approaching solar maximum, which is expected to occur in 2025. Solar Orbiter’s more recent views, taken during a close approach to the Sun in October 2023 (right), show a striking increase in solar activity. This adds weight to recent theories [paper 1, paper 2] that the maximum could arrive up to a year earlier than expected.

Solar Orbiter will help us predict the timing and strength of solar cycles. Although notoriously tricky, this is vital because solar activity can seriously affect life on Earth; extreme eruptions can damage ground-based electricity grids and disable orbiting satellites.

The images were taken by Solar Orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument. They reveal the Sun’s upper atmosphere, which has a temperature of around a million degrees Celsius. EUI helps scientists investigate the mysterious heating processes that occur in the Sun’s outer regions. Since EUI views the Sun in ultraviolet light, which is invisible to human eyes, the yellow colour is added to help us visualise our changing Sun.

 

Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA, operated by ESA. The Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument is led by the Royal Observatory of Belgium.

January 24th, 2024 05:00:00 EST -0500 Return to the labyrinth
Return to the labyrinth Image: Return to the labyrinth
January 23rd, 2024 04:00:00 EST -0500 A massive cluster is born
Image:

This image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope features an H II region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. This nebula, known as N79, is a region of interstellar atomic hydrogen that is ionised, captured here by Webb’s Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI).

N79 is a massive star-forming complex spanning roughly 1630 light-years in the generally unexplored southwest region of the LMC. N79 is typically regarded as a younger version of 30 Doradus (also known as the Tarantula Nebula), another of Webb’s recent targets. Research suggests that N79 has a star formation efficiency exceeding that of 30 Doradus by a factor of two over the past 500 000 years. 

This particular image centres on one of the three giant molecular cloud complexes, dubbed N79 South (S1 for short). The distinct ‘starburst’ pattern surrounding this bright object is a series of diffraction spikes. All telescopes which use a mirror to collect light, as Webb does, have this form of artifact which arises from the design of the telescope. In Webb's case, the six largest starburst spikes appear because of the hexagonal symmetry of Webb's 18 primary mirror segments. Patterns like these are only noticeable around very bright, compact objects, where all the light comes from the same place. Most galaxies, even though they appear very small to our eyes, are darker and more spread out than a single star, and therefore do not show this pattern.

At the longer wavelengths of light captured by MIRI, Webb’s view of N79 showcases the region’s glowing gas and dust. This is because mid-infrared light is able to reveal what is happening deeper inside the clouds (while shorter wavelengths of light would be absorbed or scattered by dust grains in the nebula). Some still-embedded protostars also appear in this field.

Star-forming regions such as this are of interest to astronomers because their chemical composition is similar to that of the gigantic star-forming regions observed when the Universe was only a few billion years old and star formation was at its peak. Star-forming regions in our Milky Way galaxy are not producing stars at the same furious rate as N79, and have a different chemical composition. Webb is now providing astronomers the opportunity to compare and contrast observations of star formation in N79 with the telescope’s deep observations of distant galaxies in the early Universe.

These observations of N79 are part of a Webb programme that is studying the evolution of the circumstellar discs and envelopes of forming stars over a wide range in mass and at different evolutionary stages. Webb’s sensitivity will enable scientists to detect for the first time the planet-forming dust discs around stars of similar mass to that of our Sun at the distance of the LMC.

This image includes 7.7-micron light shown in blue, 10 microns in cyan, 15 microns in yellow, and 21 microns in red (770W, 1000W, 1500W, and 2100W filters, respectively).

[Image description: A bright young star within a colourful nebula. The star is identifiable as the brightest spot in the image, surrounded by six large spokes of light that cross the image. A number of other bright spots can also be seen in the clouds, which are shown in great detail as layers of colourful wisps.]

Release on esawebb.org

December 19th, 2023 05:00:00 EST -0500 Galactic Chloé - the Gaia mission
Video: 00:12:29

For Gaia’s 10-year anniversary, ESA champion Galactic Chloé and the ESA Gaia team are very happy to collaborate to tell the space mission's story. From paper calculations, to the launch, and to her third data release last year, discover three of the mission's most surprising discoveries and celebrate with us Gaia’s birthday with this video produced by Galactic Studios! 

Discover the video on Youtube 

December 19th, 2023 04:00:00 EST -0500 Gaia's 10th anniversary
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Ten years ago, on 19 December 2013, ESA’s billion star-mapping satellite Gaia launched. Since then, Gaia has been scanning the sky and gathering an enormous amount of data on the positions and motions of 1.8 billion stars, enabling numerous discoveries about the history of our galaxy.

Gaia’s catalogue is ever-growing containing data on stars and other cosmic objects such as asteroids in our Solar System, exoplanets, binary stars, and other galaxies. The Gaia collaboration, consisting of about 450 people in 25 countries, prepares the data for scientific use. This has resulted in publications of over 10 000 scientific papers and 128 PhD theses.

Find out more about Gaia’s first ten years of science here.

November 30th, 2023 07:30:00 EST -0500 Space Team Europe for Euclid: Laurent Brouard
Video: 00:08:29

Focus on Euclid with Laurent Brouard: “I’m going to show you what a telescope that we send into space looks like.”

Laurent Brouard, Project Manager at Airbus Defence and Space, was responsible for building the Euclid payload module (PLM).

In this interview, which took place in a clean room at the Airbus premises in Toulouse, he describes with words, gestures, and the Euclid PLM structural and thermal model how Euclid works.

Did you know that Euclid sees the same part of the sky at the same time in both the infrared and visible wavelengths? Or that in space radiators keep the instruments cold? Have you ever wondered how light “travels” inside Euclid’s telescope?
Listen to Laurent to know more about the technology behind the mission that will map the dark matter and the dark energy of the Universe.

Space Team Europe is an ESA space community engagement initiative to gather European space actors under the same umbrella sharing values of leadership, autonomy, and responsibility.

©  ESA - European Space Agency

Access the other Space Team Europe for Euclid videos

November 29th, 2023 07:30:00 EST -0500 Space Team Europe for Euclid: Guadalupe Cañas Herrera
Video: 00:03:39

Focus on Euclid with Guadalupe Cañas Herrera: “I’m exactly where I’ve always wanted to be.”

Guadalupe Cañas Herrera, an ESA Internal Research Fellow currently working for ESA’s Euclid mission at ESTEC, the Netherlands, describes in this interview her personal and professional trajectory.

Passionate about space since her early childhood, she has spent endless nights looking at the stars. Now, this theoretical physicist develops her activities within the Euclid Scientific Consortium to establish the quantity of dark matter and dark energy existing in the Universe.

Listen to Guadalupe for a vivid account from a vocational scientist and an ardent defender of scientific collaboration.

Space Team Europe is an ESA space community engagement initiative to gather European space actors under the same umbrella sharing values of leadership, autonomy, and responsibility.

Access the other Space Team Europe for Euclid videos

November 28th, 2023 07:30:00 EST -0500 Space Team Europe for Euclid: Henk Hoekstra
Video: 00:03:08

Henk Hoekstra, professor of observational cosmology at Leiden University, the Netherlands, shares his professional trajectory linked to weak gravitational lensing, a technique used by ESA’s Euclid mission.

Henk explains how Euclid will reveal the dark side of the Universe. He uses enlightening examples involving a swimming pool and other terrestrial objects. Listen to Henk Hoekstra to understand how Euclid can make the invisible visible.

Space Team Europe is an ESA space community engagement initiative to gather European space actors under the same umbrella sharing values of leadership, autonomy, and responsibility.

Access the other Space Team Europe for Euclid videos

November 27th, 2023 07:30:00 EST -0500 Space Team Europe for Euclid: Jean-Charles Cuillandre
Video: 00:07:54

Focus on Euclid with Jean-Charles Cuillandre: “What we see in the first Euclid images is a promise of what will come in the future.”

Jean-Charles Cuillandre, astronomer at CEA Paris-Saclay, explains that he was “blown away” when he saw the first full-colour images captured by ESA’s recently launched Euclid space telescope

Being a specialist of wide-field imaging, Jean-Charles was not only involved in the programme committee that selected the celestial targets for the ESA Euclid’s ‘Early Release Observations’, but he was also in charge of processing the data both for their scientific and their outreach value.

Jean-Charles expected the resulting images to look extremely crispy since they are taken by instruments outside of the Earth’s disturbing atmosphere, but even he was not prepared for the astonishing results. The combination of the field-of-view (the area of sky covered with a single shot of the telescope), and the resolution (the number of pixels in the instruments) are unique for Euclid.

The first five released images therefore show the scientific potential of the Euclid space mission. The Euclid Consortium is responsible to fulfill this promise. More than 2000 scientists from 300 institutes in 13 European countries, the US, Canada and Japan, will try to decipher the dark Universe through the analysis of Euclid’s scientific data.

In this interview, Jean-Charles Cuillandre shares with us his view of Euclid and the elusive dark matter and dark energy. He specifically describes the apparent astronomical objects and reveals the hidden information behind their beautiful appearance.

Be ready to be “blown away”.

Space Team Europe is an ESA space community engagement initiative to gather European space actors under the same umbrella sharing values of leadership, autonomy, and responsibility.

Access the other Space Team Europe for Euclid videos

©ESA - European Space Agency

Euclid images
©ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO