For over a decade, ESA’s Gaia mission has mapped our galaxy with stunning precision—rewriting the story of the Milky Way. As its mission enters a new phase, we look back at its most groundbreaking discoveries.
Credit: ESA – European Space Agency
Chapters: 00:23 – Mapping the Milky Way and beyond 00:58 – Structure of the Milky Way 01:40 – Galactic family tree 02:27 – Mapping star-forming regions 03:00 – Ancient star streams 03:19 – Cosmic encounters 04:07 – Black holes and hidden giants
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We are Europe’s gateway to space. Our 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. Check out https://www.esa.int/ to get up to speed on everything space related.
On 19 March 2025, our 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.
📹 ESA – European Space Agency 📸 ESA /Euclid/Euclid Consortium/@NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, E. Bertin, G. Anselmi Euclid Deep Field South, 70x zoom: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, E. Bertin, G. Anselmi
From 25 July 2014 to 15 January 2025, the Gaia space observatory performed high-precision measurements of nearly two billion stars from its Lissajous orbit around the L2 Lagrange point, 1.5 million km from Earth.
After 10.5 years of groundbreaking observations, Gaia’s cold gas supply for attitude control has been depleted. On 27 March 2025, Gaia will leave its Lissajous orbit and transition into a stable heliocentric orbit. Soon after, the spacecraft will be passivated, with its instruments and transmitters switched off.
While Gaia will no longer collect new data, its scientific mission is far from over! The team continues working on Gaia Data Release 4 (expected 2026) and the final legacy catalogue (to be published not before the end of 2030), ensuring that Gaia’s discoveries will shape astronomy for decades to come.
This video visualises how Gaia leaves its Lissajous orbit and enters its final heliocentric orbit.
This video was made with Gaia Sky (https://gaiasky.space) by Tiago Nogueira, Toni Sagristà, and Stefan Jordan.
Text: Stefan Jordan, Tiago Nogueira, Tineke Roegiers
The creators would like to thank Alessandro Masat and Ander Martinez from ESA for providing Gaia’s orbit and attitude data.
Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
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We are Europe’s gateway to space. Our 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. Check out https://www.esa.int/ to get up to speed on everything space related.
On 19 March 2025, our Euclid mission released its first batch of survey data, revealing an astonishing view of the cosmic web.
With just one scan of its deep fields, Euclid has already detected 26 million galaxies, some as far as 10.5 billion light-years away! This is just a preview of what’s to come, as Euclid will continue mapping the Universe in unprecedented detail.
What’s in this first release? – Three vast mosaics covering 63 square degrees of the sky – A catalogue of 380 000 galaxies, classified with AI + citizen scientists – 500 new gravitational lens candidates, almost all never seen before – The first hints of Euclid’s full cosmic atlas, which will eventually cover one-third of the sky
This data is a huge leap forward in understanding how galaxies are distributed across the Universe and how dark matter and dark energy shape the cosmos.
Over the next six years, Euclid will revisit these deep fields 30 to 52 times, uncovering billions of galaxies and pushing the astrophysics’ boundaries.
📹 @europeanspaceagency 📸 ESA /Euclid/Euclid Consortium/@NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, E. Bertin, G. Anselmi Euclid Deep Field South, 70x zoom: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, E. Bertin, G. Anselmi
The European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope 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.
————————————————— Credits: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, E. Bertin, G. Anselmi, M. Walmsley, M. Huertas-Company; ESA/Gaia/DPAC; ESA/Planck Collaboration —————————————————
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Witness the breathtaking beauty of our cosmic neighbor—the Andromeda galaxy—located 2.5 million light-years away. This spiral disk galaxy appears elliptical from Earth due to its tilted orientation. In this panoramic view, young blue stars shimmer along the galaxy’s outer rim, while older yellowish stars cluster toward the bright central hub, resembling the yolk of a cosmic fried egg. 🍳💫
This vibrant portrait is the result of over 10 years of observations and more than 600 snapshots captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Altogether, it reveals the mesmerizing glow of 200 million stars scattered across the galaxy’s immense 200,000-light-year-wide disk. As the camera zooms into the central region, a dense sea of ancient stars comes into view. Panning across the galaxy’s expanse, we see intricate patterns of dark dust clouds weaving through space, while vibrant blue star clusters stand out along the edges, signaling regions of ongoing star formation. 🌌✨
Prepare to be amazed as we explore one of the largest and most detailed galactic images ever captured—offering a glimpse into the heart of a distant galaxy, yet eerily similar to our own Milky Way.
📸 NASA, ESA, B. Williams (University of Washington), G. Bacon (STScI) 🎶 Rain Clouds – Beautiful Visions
NASA’s SPHEREx and PUNCH missions are set to launch together, with one mission aiming to answer big-picture questions about our universe and the other seeking a better understanding of our Sun.
SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) is an infrared space telescope designed to map the entire sky like none before it. SPHEREx will study the origins of the universe, galaxies, and the ingredients for life in our galaxy.
PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) is a constellation of four small satellites dedicated to studying the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the solar corona, and how it extends into space to form the solar wind. Understanding these processes is critical to predicting space weather and its impact on Earth’s magnetic field.
Together, SPHEREx and PUNCH demonstrate NASA’s commitment to uncovering the fundamental forces that shape our universe and our own star.
A group of volunteers is spending two months lying in bed—with their feet up and one shoulder always touching the mattress—even while eating, showering, and using the toilet. But why? This extreme bedrest study is helping scientists understand how space travel affects the human body and how to keep astronauts healthy on long missions.
Microgravity causes muscle and bone loss, fluid shifts, and other physiological changes similar to those experienced by bedridden patients on Earth. By studying volunteers here on Earth, researchers can develop better countermeasures for astronauts and even improve treatments for medical conditions like osteoporosis.
In this study, participants are divided into three groups: one stays in bed with no exercise, another cycles in bed to mimic astronaut workouts, and a third cycles while being spun in a centrifuge to simulate artificial gravity. Scientists hope artificial gravity could become a key tool in protecting astronauts during deep-space missions.
Could you handle 60 days in bed for the sake of space exploration? Let us know in the comments!
Credits: ESA – European Space Agency
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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.
We are Europe’s gateway to space. Our 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. Check out https://www.esa.int/ to get up to speed on everything space related.
This stunning artist’s animation of the Milky Way is based on data from ESA’s Gaia space telescope. Gaia has completely reshaped our understanding of our home galaxy—revealing unexpected details about its spiral arms, central bar, and overall structure.
We can’t take a selfie of the Milky Way, but thanks to Gaia, we’re seeing it clearer than ever! And with more data releases on the way, our view will only get sharper.
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.
We are Europe’s gateway to space. Our 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. Check out https://www.esa.int/ to get up to speed on everything space related.
From the deep sea to outer space! Submarines are helping scientists’ study how humans adapt to extreme environments — just like astronauts on long space missions.
What we learn underwater today could shape the future of space exploration tomorrow.
📹 ESA – European Space Agency 📸 ESA/Portuguese Space Agency/Portuguese Navy
BepiColombo flew past Mercury for the fifth time on 1 December 2024.
During this flyby, BepiColombo gathered more data on the mysterious planet and its surroundings. Aside from taking some ‘regular’ photos of the planet and measuring particles and electromagnetic fields in the space around it, this flyby was the first time that any spacecraft imaged Mercury in mid-infrared wavelengths of light.
BepiColombo will pass much closer to Mercury’s north pole during its final flyby of Mercury on 8 January 2025, its last visit before arriving to enter orbit about the planet in November 2026.
📹 ESA – European Space Agency 📸 MERTIS/DLR/University of Münster & NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
At the start of this new year, close-up pictures and solar flare data that the ESA-led Solar Orbiter mission has been recording for more than three years. See and hear for yourself how the number of flares and their intensity increase, a clear sign of the Sun approaching the peak of the 11-year solar cycle.
This video combines ultraviolet images of the Sun’s outer atmosphere (the corona, yellow) taken by Solar Orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument, with the size and locations of solar flares (blue circles) as recorded by the Spectrometer/Telescope for Imaging X-rays (STIX) instrument. The accompanying audio is a sonification based on the detected flares and the spacecraft’s distance to the Sun.
Solar Orbiter moves on an elliptical path around the Sun, making a close approach to our star every six months. We can see this in the video from the spacecraft’s perspective, with the Sun moving closer and farther over the course of each year. In the sonification, this is represented by the low background humming that loudens as the Sun gets closer and becomes quieter as it moves further away. (There are some abrupt shifts in distance visible in the video, as it skips over dates where one or both instruments were inactive or collecting a different type of data.)
The blue circles represent solar flares: bursts of high-energy radiation of which STIX detects the X-rays. Flares are sent out by the Sun when energy stored in ‘twisted’ magnetic fields (usually above sunspots) is suddenly released. The size of each circle indicates how strong the flare is, with stronger flares sending out more X-rays. We can hear the flares in the metallic clinks in the sonification, where the sharpness of the sound corresponds to how energetic the solar flare is.
Many thanks to Klaus Nielsen (DTU Space / Maple Pools) for making the sonification in this video. If you would like to hear more sonifications and music by this artist, please visit: https://linktr.ee/maplepools Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA, operated by ESA.
————————————————— Credits Credit: ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI & STIX, Klaus Nielsen (DTU Space/Maple Pools) Acknowledgements: Data processing for video by Laura Hayes License: CC BY-SA 3.0 or ESA Standard License
Video credit slate Solar Orbiter animation: ESA Sun images: ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI Solar flare data: ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/STIX Data processing for video: Laura Hayes Data sonification & music: Klaus Nielsen (DTU Space/Maple Pools) —————————————————
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We are Europe’s gateway to space. Our 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. Check out https://www.esa.int/ to get up to speed on everything space related.
Join us on a unique video tour of the Sun’s mesmerising surface. Thanks to its innovative instrumentation and a ‘daring’ trajectory passing close to the Sun, ESA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft has obtained the highest-resolution full views of the Sun’s surface to date.
Watching the Sun in visible light, Solar Orbiter reveals a grainy surface and dark sunspots. On the same day, the spacecraft mapped the Sun’s magnetic field, tracked how fast and in which direction scorching hot material on the surface is moving, and snapped a hypnotising image in ultraviolet light of the Sun’s upper atmosphere, the corona. All taken on the same day, the four new images shown in this video let us peel away the Sun’s many layers.
The images were taken when Solar Orbiter was less than 74 million kilometres from the Sun; being so close meant each high-resolution image only covers a small portion of the Sun. To obtain the full-disc views showcased in the video, 25 images were stitched together like a mosaic. The Sun has a diameter of around 8000 pixels in the full mosaics, revealing an extraordinary amount of detail.
Credit: ESA – European Space Agency Acknowledgements: Sun images: ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/PHI and EUI Teams; Solar Orbiter spacecraft animation: ESA/ATG medialab; Voiceover: Juliet Hannay
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We are Europe’s gateway to space. Our 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. Check out https://www.esa.int/ to get up to speed on everything space related.
This video takes the viewer on a journey that zooms through space to reveal the Tarantula Nebula.
Thousands of never-before-seen young stars are spotted in the stellar nursery called 30 Doradus, captured by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. It is nicknamed the Tarantula Nebula for the appearance of its dusty filaments in previous telescope images, the nebula has long been a favourite for astronomers studying star formation. In addition to young stars, Webb reveals distant background galaxies, as well as the detailed structure and composition of the nebula’s gas and dust.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, ESO, E. Slawik, N. Risinger, D. De Martin, D. Lennon, E. Sabbi, N. Bartmann, M. Zamani Music: tonelabs – Happy Hubble
On 12 November 2014, after a ten-year journey through the Solar System and over 500 million kilometres from home, Rosetta’s lander Philae made space exploration history by touching down on a comet for the first time. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of this extraordinary feat, we celebrate by taking a look back over the mission’s highlights.
Rosetta was an ESA mission with contributions from its Member States and NASA. It studied Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko for over two years, including delivering lander Philae to the comet’s surface. Philae was provided by a consortium led by DLR, MPS, CNES and ASI.
Credits: ESA – European Space Agency
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We are Europe’s gateway to space. Our 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. Check out https://www.esa.int/ to get up to speed on everything space related.
In mythology, centaurs are half-human, half-horse creatures, but in space, they’re celestial objects orbiting the Sun between Jupiter and Neptune.
Centaurs are “hybrid” objects in the sense that they share characteristics with trans-Neptunian objects from the Kuiper Belt reservoir and short-period comets. A team of scientists used the James Web Telescope to study Centaur 29P.
While data from previous observations of Centaur 29P showed a carbon monoxide (CO) gas jet pointed toward Earth, Webb parsed the jet’s composition in greater detail, and also detected multiple never-before-seen features of the centaur: two jets of carbon dioxide (CO2) emanating in the north and south directions, and another jet of CO pointing toward the north.
Centaur 29P’s different CO and CO2 abundances suggest that the body may be composed of different pieces that coalesced together during its formation. However, other scenarios to explain Centaur 29P’s outgassing activity are still being considered.
In 2022 NASA’s DART spacecraft made history, and changed the Solar System forever, by impacting the Dimorphos asteroid and measurably shifting its orbit around the larger Didymos asteroid. In the process a plume of debris was thrown out into space.
The latest modelling, available on the preprint server arXiv and accepted for publication in the September volume of The Planetary Science Journal, shows how small meteoroids from that debris could eventually reach both Mars and Earth – potentially in an observable (although quite safe) manner.
Discover the first page of ESA Euclid’s great cosmic atlas and marvel at millions of stars and galaxies captured in pristine detail, in a huge 208-gigapixel mosaic. The mosaic covers an area of the Southern Sky more than 500 times the area of the full Moon as seen from Earth.
This video takes you through a rare sky dive. Starting from a vast cosmic panorama bedazzled by some 14 million galaxies, a series of ever-deeper zooms brings you to a crisp view of a swirling spiral galaxy, in a final image enlarged 600 times compared to the full mosaic.
Although the scenes are enticing, they are not taken for their beauty, but to help us advance our understanding of the cosmos. Many of the 14 million galaxies in the initial vista will be used to study the hidden influence of dark matter and dark energy on the Universe.
Unveiled as a teaser of the wide survey, the mosaic accounts for 1% of the area that Euclid will cover over six years, and was obtained by combining 260 observations collected in just two weeks.
This first chunk of Euclid’s survey was revealed on 15 October 2024 at the International Astronautical Congress in Milan, Italy, by ESA’s Director General Josef Aschbacher and Director of Science Carole Mundell.
————————————————— Copyright: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, CEA Paris-Saclay, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, E. Bertin, G. Anselmi; ESA/Gaia/DPAC; ESA/Planck Collaboration —————————————————
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We are Europe’s gateway to space. Our 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. Check out https://www.esa.int/ to get up to speed on everything space related.
ESA is venturing towards putting a spacecraft into orbit around Mars using a technique that engineers have studied for over half a century but never dared to attempt.
Ten years ago, on 19 December 2013, our 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 discoveries about the history of our galaxy.
Gaia is creating an extraordinarily precise three-dimensional map of more than a billion stars throughout our Milky Way galaxy and beyond, mapping their motions, luminosity, temperature and composition.
This huge stellar census will provide the data needed to tackle an enormous range of important questions related to the origin, structure and evolutionary history of our galaxy.
Gaia’s catalogue is ever-growing containing data on stars and other cosmic objects such as galaxies, exoplanets, and binary stars. Here’s to more discoveries!
Missions to Mars have made many exciting discoveries that have transformed our understanding of the planet, but the next step is to bring samples to Earth for detailed analysis in sophisticated laboratories.
There is no point in sending human explorers on long voyages around the solar system if they arrive at their destination in poor physical shape. Long stays in zero gravity are not good for the human body.
We already know that astronauts lose bone mass at around 1% for every month they are in space; muscles – including heart muscles – atrophy despite hours of exercise; and there are a host of other problems.
Humans are adaptable beings. Wear glasses that turn your view of the world upside-down and within two weeks your brain will have adapted to the topsy-turvy world.
Researchers suspect that astronauts’ brains adapt to living in weightlessness by using previously untapped links between neurons. As the astronauts learn to float around in their spacecraft, left–right and up–down become second nature as these neuronal connections are activated.
To confirm this theory, up to 16 astronauts will be put through advanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanners before and after their flights to study any changes in their brain structure. A control group on ground will undergo the same scans for further comparison.
The research is providing scientists on Earth clues where to look in the brains of people who suffer from disorders based on previous traumatic experiences such as vertigo.
Like every other living creature we know of, humans evolved at the bottom of a gravity well. We take the Earth’s tug for granted, and so do our bodies. So it’s not surprising that our bodies behave oddly in orbit. What is surprising is that humans turn out to adapt remarkably well to zero-g (more precisely, microgravity).
ESA is testing kombucha cultures, famous for their fermentative properties and potential health benefits, to assess their resilience in space. These cultures hold great promise for supporting humans on the Moon and Mars.
ESA’s Euclid mission will create a 3D-map of the Universe that scientists will use to measure the properties of dark energy and dark matter and uncover the nature of these mysterious components. The map will contain a vast amount of data, it will cover more than a third of the sky and its third dimension will represent time spanning 10 billion years of cosmic history.
But dealing with the huge and detailed set of novel data that Euclid observations will produce is not an easy task. To prepare for this, scientists in the Euclid Consortium have developed one of the most accurate and comprehensive computer simulations of the large-scale structure of the Universe ever produced. They named this the Euclid Flagship simulation.
Running on large banks of advanced processors, computer simulations provide a unique laboratory to model the formation and evolution of large-scale structures in the Universe, such as galaxies, galaxy clusters, and the filamentary cosmic web they form. These state-of-the-art computational techniques allow astrophysicists to trace the motion and behavior of an extremely large number of dark-matter particles over cosmological volumes under the influence of their own gravitational pull. They replicate how and where galaxies form and grow, and are used to predict their distribution across the celestial sphere.
Explore the Euclid Flagship simulation in this video and get a sneak preview of the structure of the dark Universe, as we currently model it. New insights will be brought to you by the Euclid mission in the coming years.
Credits: ESA/Euclid Consortium/Cacao Cinema The authors kindly acknowledge the use of the Splotch package: http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/~kdolag/Splotch
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We are Europe’s gateway to space. Our 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. Check out https://www.esa.int/ to get up to speed on everything space related.
Scientists are on a quest to understand how water, the foundation of life as we know it, reaches distant planets. The PDS 70 system, with its inner and outer discs hosting gas-giant planets, holds intriguing clues. Recently, MIRI, part of the James Webb Space Telescope, detected water vapor in the inner disc at distances less than 160 million km from the star – a zone where rocky, Earth-like planets may be taking shape!
This discovery is groundbreaking, as it delves into the region where terrestrial planets typically form. The PDS 70 star is relatively old, yet it surprisingly harbors water vapor, offering the raw materials needed for rocky world construction. But where did the water come from? Could it be forming in place or transported from the outer disc?
The PDS 70 system’s secrets await further exploration, and Webb’s NIRCam and NIRSpec instruments will soon dive deeper into this fascinating cosmic phenomenon. As we unlock the mysteries of water in space, we inch closer to understanding the origins of life beyond our own planet.
📹 ESA – European Space Agency
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We are Europe’s gateway to space. Our 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. Check out https://www.esa.int/ to get up to speed on everything space related.
Scientists may have found the solution to creating oxygen in space with artificial photosynthesis!
They are creating devices that mimic plant photosynthesis, to turn sunlight and water into oxygen without the need for electricity.
These devices produce oxygen from water and sunlight using semiconductor materials coated with metallic catalysts.
Scientists believe artificial photosynthesis could even work on Mars, where sunlight is weaker, by using simple solar mirrors to concentrate sunlight and boost oxygen production.
These devices could not only help us explore space but could also bring us closer to meeting our green energy and sustainability goals here on Earth. 🌍💚
📹 ESA – European Space Agency
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We are Europe’s gateway to space. Our 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. Check out https://www.esa.int/ to get up to speed on everything space related.
This video takes the viewer on a journey through space to the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex.
From our cosmic backyard in the Solar System to distant galaxies near the dawn of time, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has delivered on its promise of revealing the Universe like never before in its first year of science operations. To celebrate the completion of a successful first year, a new Webb image has been released of a small star-forming region in the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex. While the region is relatively quiet, its proximity at 390 light-years makes for a highly detailed close-up, with no foreground stars in the intervening space.
Credits: ESA/Webb, NASA, ESA, CSA, JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA, DSS2, N. Bartmann (ESA/Webb), E. Slawik, N. Risinger, D. de Martin, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb), K. Pontoppidan (STScI), A. Pagan (STScI)
Music: Tonelabs – The Red North
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We are Europe’s gateway to space. Our 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. Check out https://www.esa.int/ to get up to speed on everything space related.
This video takes the viewer on a journey through space to the peculiar galaxy NGC 3256.
This distorted galaxy is the wreckage of a head-on collision between two spiral galaxies which likely occurred 500 million years ago, and it is studded with clumps of young stars which were formed as gas and dust from the two galaxies collided.
We are Europe’s gateway to space. Our 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. Check out https://www.esa.int/ to get up to speed on everything space related.
ESA DG Josef Aschbacher, accompanied by TAS CEO Hervé Derrey, Airbus DS EVP Jean-Marc Nasr and OHB Board Member Lutz Bertling, among others, will unveil the Zero Debris Charter initiative, an ambitious drive towards European leadership in space debris mitigation and remediation.
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We are Europe’s gateway to space. Our 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. Check out https://www.esa.int/ to get up to speed on everything space related.
Watch the replay of the live session from the Paris Air Show 2023 to watch the press briefing on space transportation. Speakers will share the current status of the Ariane 6 programme, and the next key milestones towards the inaugural flight.
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We are Europe’s gateway to space. Our 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. Check out https://www.esa.int/ to get up to speed on everything space related.
We are Europe’s gateway to space. Our 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. Check out https://www.esa.int/ to get up to speed on everything space related.
Watch the recording of the live session from the Paris Air Show 2023 for a conference examining Europe’s aspirations in human and robotic space exploration. Speakers include ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher, CNES CEO Philippe Baptiste, Director General of the German Space Agency Walther Pelzer, and President of the Italian Space Agency (ASI) Teodoro Valente. ESA astronauts Thomas Pesquet, Samantha Cristoforetti, and Matthias Maurer will provide their perspectives.
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We are Europe’s gateway to space. Our 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. Check out https://www.esa.int/ to get up to speed on everything space related.
By using concrete examples of the water and carbon cycles, the speakers in this session will focus on the grand science questions before us and how we can turn them into answers and solutions most useful to decision-makers at the front line of the climate crisis. Earth is a highly dynamic system where the transport and exchanges of energy and matter are influenced by a multitude of processes and feedback mechanisms. Untangling these complex processes to better understand how Earth works as a system is a major challenge; a challenge that satellites, with their global view, are ideally positioned to tackle. While each mission gives us unique insights, it is by combining their data that makes scientific findings shine the brightest. This, in turn, puts European and international collaboration at the heart of Earth observation today.
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We are Europe’s gateway to space. Our 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. Check out https://www.esa.int/ to get up to speed on everything space related.
This video takes the viewers on a journey to the barred spiral galaxy NGC 5068, whose bright central bar is visible in the upper left of this image. NGC 5068 lies around 17 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo.
With its ability to peer through the gas and dust enshrouding newborn stars, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope is the perfect telescope to explore the processes governing star formation. Stars and planetary systems are born amongst swirling clouds of gas and dust that are opaque to visible-light observatories like Hubble or the VLT. The keen vision at infrared wavelengths of two of Webb’s instruments — MIRI and NIRCam — allowed astronomers to see right through the gargantuan clouds of dust in NGC 5068 and capture the processes of star formation as they happened. This image combines the capabilities of these two instruments, providing a truly unique look at the composition of NGC 5068.
Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-JWST Team, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, DSS, N. Bartmann (ESA/Webb), E. Slawik, N. Risinger, D. de Martin (ESA/Webb), M. Zamani (ESA/Webb)
Music: Tonelabs – The Red North
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We are Europe’s gateway to space. Our 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. Check out https://www.esa.int/ to get up to speed on everything space related.
