ESA Space Science

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has captured a beautiful juxtaposition of the nearby protostellar outflow known as Herbig-Haro 49/50 with a perfectly positioned, more distant spiral galaxy. Due to the close proximity of this Herbig-Haro object to Earth, this new composite infrared image of the outflow from a young star allows researchers to examine details on small spatial scales like never before. With Webb, we can better understand how the jet activity associated with the formation of young stars can affect the environment surrounding them.

The European Space Agency’s Euclid mission has scouted out the three areas in the sky where it will eventually provide the deepest observations of its mission.

In just one week of observations, with one scan of each region so far, Euclid already spotted 26 million galaxies. The farthest of those are up to 10.5 billion light-years away.

In the coming years, Euclid will pass over these three regions tens of times, capturing many more faraway galaxies, making these fields truly ‘deep’ by the end of the nominal mission in 2030.

The first glimpse of 63 square degrees of the sky, the equivalent area of more than 300 times the full Moon, already gives an impressive preview of the scale of Euclid’s grand cosmic atlas when the mission is complete. This atlas will cover one-third of the entire sky – 14 000 square degrees – in this high-quality detail.

Explore the three deep field previews in ESASky:

-          Euclid Deep Field South

-          Euclid Deep Field Fornax:

-          Euclid Deep Field North:

Read more: Euclid opens data treasure trove, offers glimpse of deep fields

On 19 March 2025, the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission released its first batch of survey data, including a preview of its deep fields. Here, hundreds of thousands of galaxies in different shapes and sizes take centre stage and show a glimpse of their large-scale organisation in the cosmic web.

The European Space Agency is releasing the first catalogue of astronomical data from the Euclid space telescope, including three new enormous image mosaics with zoom-ins. Follow the reveal live on Wednesday 19 March at 11:00 BST / 12:00 CET.

Help us uncover the secrets of the Sun! Our Solar Orbiter spacecraft has been watching the Sun since February 2020. With five years’ worth of data waiting to be explored, it’s time to dig in. The new ‘Solar Radio Burst Tracker’ Zooniverse project is ready for you.

At the European Space Agency’s technical heart in the Netherlands, engineers have spent the last five months unboxing and testing elements of Europe’s next space science mission. With the two main parts now joined together, Smile is well on its way to being ready to launch by the end of 2025.

Back in 2023, we reported on Solar Orbiter’s discovery of tiny jets near the Sun’s south pole that could be powering the solar wind. The team behind this research has now used even more data from the European Space Agency’s prolific solar mission to confirm that these jets exist all over dark patches in the Sun’s atmosphere, and that they really are a source of not only fast but also slow solar wind.

The newfound jets can be seen in this sped-up video as hair-like wisps that flash very briefly, for example within the circled regions of the Sun's surface. In reality they last around one minute and fling out charged particles at about 100 km/s.

The surprising result is published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics, highlighting how Solar Orbiter’s unique combination of instruments can unveil the mysteries of the star at the centre of our Solar System.

The solar wind is the never-ending rain of electrically charged particles given out by the Sun. It pervades the Solar System and its effects can be felt on Earth. Yet despite decades of study, its origin remained poorly understood. Until now.

The solar wind comes in two main forms: fast and slow. We have known for decades that the fast solar wind comes from the direction of dark patches in the Sun’s atmosphere called coronal holes – regions where the Sun’s magnetic field does not turn back down into the Sun but rather stretches deep into the Solar System.

Charged particles can flow along these ‘open’ magnetic field lines, heading away from the Sun, and creating the solar wind. But a big question remained: how do these particles get launched from the Sun in the first place?

Building upon their previous discovery, the research team (led by Lakshmi Pradeep Chitta at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Germany) used Solar Orbiter’s onboard ‘cameras’ to spot more tiny jets within coronal holes close to the Sun’s equator.

By combining these high-resolution images with direct measurements of solar wind particles and the Sun’s magnetic field around Solar Orbiter, the researchers could directly connect the solar wind measured at the spacecraft back to those exact same jets.

What’s more, the team was surprised to find not just fast solar wind coming from these jets, but also slow solar wind. This is the first time that we can say for sure that at least some of the slow solar wind also comes from tiny jets in coronal holes – until now, the origin of the solar wind had been elusive.

The fact that the same underlying process drives both fast and slow solar wind comes as a surprise. The discovery is only possible thanks to Solar Orbiter’s unique combination of advanced imaging systems, as well as its instruments that can directly detect particles and magnetic fields.

The measurements were taken when Solar Orbiter made close approaches to the Sun in October 2022 and April 2023. These close approaches happen roughly twice a year; during the next ones, the researchers hope to collect more data to better understand how these tiny jets ‘launch’ the solar wind.

Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA, operated by ESA. This research used data from Solar Orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI), Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI), Solar Wind Plasma Analyser (SWA) and Magnetometer (MAG). Find out more about the instruments Solar Orbiter is using to reveal more about the Sun.

Read our news story from 2023 about how Solar Orbiter discovered tiny jets that could power the solar wind

Read more about how Solar Orbiter can trace the solar wind back to its source region on the Sun

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Using data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, scientists have found a huge exoplanet and a brown dwarf. This is the first time a planet has been uniquely discovered by Gaia’s ability to sense the gravitational tug or ‘wobble’ the planet induces on a star. Both the planet and brown dwarf are orbiting low-mass stars, a scenario thought to be extremely rare.

Read more.

Access the related animations: Gaia-4b / Gaia-5b

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Listen to the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo spacecraft as it flew past Mercury on 8 January 2025. This sixth and final flyby used the little planet's gravity to steer the spacecraft on course for entering orbit around Mercury in 2026. 

What you can hear in the sonification soundtrack of this video are real spacecraft vibrations measured by the Italian Spring Accelerometer (ISA) instrument. The accelerometer data have been shifted in frequency to make them audible to human ears – one hour of measurements have been sped up to one minute of sound.  

BepiColombo is always shaking ever so slightly: fuel is slightly sloshing, the solar panels are vibrating at their natural frequency, heat pipes are pushing vapour through small tubes, and so forth. This creates the eerie underlying hum throughout the video.  

But as BepiColombo gets closer to Mercury, ISA detects other forces acting on the spacecraft. Most scientifically interesting are the audible shocks that sound like short, soft bongs. These are caused by the spacecraft responding to entering and exiting Mercury's shadow, where the Sun's intense radiation is suddenly blocked. One of ISA's scientific goals is to monitor the changes in the ‘solar radiation pressure’ – a force caused by sunlight striking BepiColombo as it orbits the Sun and, eventually, Mercury. 

The loudest noises – an ominous ‘rumbling’ – are caused by the spacecraft's large solar panels rotating. The first rotation occurs in shadow at 00:17 in the video, while the second adjustment at 00:51 was also captured by one of the spacecraft’s monitoring cameras. 

Faint sounds like wind being picked up in a phone call, which grow more audible around 30 seconds into the video, are caused by Mercury's gravitational field pulling the nearest and furthest parts of the spacecraft by different amounts. As the planet's gravity stretches the spacecraft ever so slightly, the spacecraft responds structurally. At the same time, the onboard reaction wheels change their speed to maintain the spacecraft's orientation, which you can hear as a frequency shift in the background.    

This is the last time that many of these effects can be measured with BepiColombo's largest solar panels, which make the spacecraft more susceptible to vibrations. The spacecraft module carrying these panels will not enter orbit around Mercury with the mission's two orbiter spacecraft. 

The video shows an accurate simulation of the spacecraft and its route past Mercury during the flyby, made with the SPICE-enhanced Cosmographia spacecraft visualisation tool. The inset that appears 38 seconds into the video shows real photographs taken by one of BepiColombo's monitoring cameras.

Read more about BepiColombo's sixth Mercury flyby 

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This is a new artist’s animation of our galaxy, the Milky Way, based on data from ESA’s Gaia space telescope.

Gaia has changed our impression of the Milky Way. Even seemingly simple ideas about the nature of our galaxy’s central bar and the spiral arms have been overturned. Gaia has shown us that it has more than two spiral arms and that they are less prominent than we previously thought. In addition, Gaia has shown that its central bar is more inclined with respect to the Sun.

No spacecraft can travel beyond our galaxy, so we can’t take a selfie, but Gaia is giving us the best insight yet of what our home galaxy looks like. Once all of Gaia’s observations collected over the past decade are made available in two upcoming data releases, we can expect an even sharper view of the Milky Way.

Click here to download the still image of the Milky Way.