View allAll Photos Tagged spacescience
NGC 4485 has been involved in a dramatic gravitational interplay with its larger galactic neighbour NGC 4490 — out of frame to the bottom right in this image. This ruined the original, ordered spiral structure of the galaxy and transformed it into an irregular one.
The interaction also created a stream of material about 25 000 light-years long, connecting the two galaxies. The stream, visible to the right of the galaxy is made up of bright knots and huge pockets of gassy regions, as well as enormous regions of star formation in which young, massive, blue stars are born.
Below NGC 4485 one can see a bright, orange background galaxy: CXOU J123033.6+414057. This galaxy is the source of X-ray radiation studied by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. It’s distance from Earth is about 850 million light-years.
Learn more about this image here
Credits: ESA/Hubble, NASA; CC BY 4.0
Check our accessible text here.
The sunny side of the Moon is hotter than boiling water, but the night side is colder than anywhere on Earth. Lunar temperatures vary from 123 degrees Celsius in the day and down to minus 233 degrees Celsius permanently shadowed polar craters.
Image description: Half of the Moon wears a scarf, the other half has sunglasses . Two thermometers show minus 233 degrees Celsius and 123 degrees Celsius.
Credits: ESA
This NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope’s mid-infrared image shows four coiled shells of dust around a pair of Wolf-Rayet stars known as Apep for the first time. Previous observations by other telescopes showed only one.
Webb’s data, combined with observations from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, confirmed that the two Wolf-Rayet stars sail past one another approximately every 190 years. Over each orbit, they make a close pass for 25 years, producing and spewing amorphous carbon dust.
Webb’s new data also confirmed that there are three stars gravitationally bound to one another in this system. Holes are “sliced” into these shells by the third star, a massive supergiant.
Learn more about this result here.
[Image description: Four dust shells in Wolf-Rayet Apep expand away from three central stars that appear as a single pinpoint of light. The shells are curved, and the interior shell looks like a backward lowercase e shape.]
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Y. Han (Caltech), R. White (Macquarie University), A. Pagan (STScI); CC BY 4.0
This fuzzy orb of light is a giant elliptical galaxy filled with an incredible 200 billion stars. Unlike spiral galaxies, which have a well-defined structure and boast picturesque spiral arms, elliptical galaxies appear fairly smooth and featureless. This is likely why this galaxy, named Messier 49, was discovered by French astronomer Charles Messier in 1771. At a distance of 56 million light-years, and measuring 157 000 light-years across, M49 was the first member of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies to be discovered, and it is more luminous than any other galaxy at its distance or nearer.
Elliptical galaxies tend to contain a larger portion of older stars than spiral galaxies and also lack young blue stars. Messier 49 itself is very yellow, which indicates that the stars within it are mostly older and redder than the Sun. In fact, the last major episode of star formation was about six billion years ago — before the Sun was even born!
Messier 49 is also rich in globular clusters; it hosts about 6000, a number that dwarfs the 150 found in and around the Milky Way. On average, these clusters are 10 billion years old. Messier 49 is also known to host a supermassive black hole at its centre with the mass of more than 500 million Suns, identifiable by the X-rays pouring out from the heart of the galaxy (as this Hubble image comprises infrared observations, these X-rays are not visible here).
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Blakenslee, P Cote et al.; CC BY 4.0
This image features Arp 72, a very selective galaxy group that only includes two interacting galaxies: NGC 5996 (the large spiral galaxy) and NGC 5994 (its smaller companion, in the lower left of the image). Both galaxies lie approximately 160 million light-years from Earth, and their cores are separated from each other by a distance of around 67 thousand light-years. Moreover, the distance between the galaxies at their closest points is even smaller, closer to 40 thousand light-years. Whilst this might still sound vast, in galactic separation terms it is really very cosy! For comparison, the distance between the Milky Way and its nearest independent galactic neighbour Andromeda is around 2.5 million light-years. Alternatively, the distance between the Milky Way and its largest and brightest satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (satellite galaxies are galaxies that are bound in orbit around another galaxy), is about 162 thousand light-years.
Given this, coupled with the fact that NGC 5996 is roughly comparable in size to the Milky Way, it is not surprising that NGC 5996 and NGC 5994 — apparently separated by only 40 thousand light-years or so — are interacting with one another. In fact, the interaction might be what has caused the spiral shape of NGC 5996 to distort and apparently be drawn in the direction of NGC 5994. It also prompted the formation of the very long and faint tail of stars and gas curving away from NGC 5996, up to the top right of the image. This ‘tidal tail’ is a common phenomenon that appears when galaxies get in close together, as can be seen in several Hubble images.
[Image Description: A large spiral galaxy with a smaller neighbouring galaxy. The spiral galaxy is wide and distorted, with colourful dust. Its companion lies close by it at the end of a spiral arm, to the lower left. A long, faint tail of stars reaches up from the right side of the spiral galaxy to the top of the image. Several small, distant galaxies can be seen in the background, as well as one bright star in the foreground.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, L. Galbany, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA; CC BY 4.0
The Andromeda galaxy, or M31, the Milky Way’s largest galactic neighbour, as viewed by ESA’s Gaia satellite using information from the mission’s second data release.
This view is not a photograph but was compiled by mapping the total density of stars detected by Gaia in each pixel of the image.
Acknowledgement: Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC); A. Moitinho / A. F. Silva / M. Barros / C. Barata, University of Lisbon, Portugal; H. Savietto, Fork Research, Portugal
Credits: ESA/Gaia/DPAC
This context map is based on data from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) experiment onboard NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) mission. It shows the slice of Mars captured by the High Resolution Stereo Camera aboard ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft to celebrate the mission’s 15th anniversary: the intriguing and once-active Tharsis province.
Included in this labelled view is the extensive canyon system of Valles Marineris, the web-like system of fissures comprising Noctis Labyrinthus, two out of four volcanoes, the north pole, and the so-called Martian dichotomy: the difference in altitude between the northern and southern regions of Mars. Areas at higher altitudes are shown in red-orange tones, while those at lower ones are displayed in blue-greens (as indicated by the scale to the bottom left).
This map was created by the Planetary Sciences and Remote Sensing group at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.
Credits: NASA/MGS/MOLA Science Team, FU Berlin
Space Science image of the week:
Seen here is a Cheops team member reflected in the satellite’s main mirror, and framed by the black internal surface of the telescope tube. The back of the secondary mirror is seen at the centre of the image, held in place by three struts.
Cheops is ESA’s CHaracterising ExoPlanet Satellite mission that will monitor Earth-to-Neptune-sized planets orbiting stars in other star systems.
Light from the host stars will enter the telescope and be reflected by the primary mirror towards the secondary, which in turn will direct the starlight through a hole in the centre of the primary mirror, onto the CCD detector.
It is the same design used for the larger NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and ESA’s Herschel observatory.
By precisely tracking a star’s brightness, Cheops will detect the transit of a planet as it passes briefly across the star’s face. This allows the radius of the planet to be accurately measured. For those planets of known mass, the density will be revealed, providing an indication of the structure, and ultimately how planets of this size formed and evolved.
The Cheops telescope reached an important milestone at the end of April when it was delivered to the University of Bern by Leonardo-Finmeccanica, on behalf of Italy’s ASI space agency and the INAF Italian National Institute for Astrophysics.
Read more about the telescope and latest tests: CHEOPS telescope arrives at new home
Cheops is an ESA mission in partnership with Switzerland and with important contributions from 10 other member states.
Credit: University of Bern / T. Beck
On Monday 3 July the Ariane 5 launch vehicle for flight VA261 left the final assembly building for roll-out to the launch pad at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. Flight VA261 will carry to space two payloads – the German space agency DLR’s experimental communications satellite Heinrich Hertz and the French communications satellite Syracuse 4b. The flight will be the 117th and final mission for Ariane 5, a series which began in 1996. Flight VA261 will lift off as soon as 5 July at 23:00 BST (6 July at 00:00 CEST), pending suitable conditions for launch.
Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja
The 3-stage section of the Soyuz launcher that will lift ESA’s Cheops satellite into space is transferred to the launch pad in a horizontal position and raised vertically in-situ. Launch is scheduled for 18 December from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
Credits: ESA/CNES/Arianespace/Optique vidéo du CSG/S Martin
This swirling palette of colours portrays the life cycle of stars in a spiral galaxy known as NGC 300.
Located some six million light-years away, NGC 300 is relatively nearby. It is one of the closest galaxies beyond the Local Group – the hub of galaxies to which our own Milky Way galaxy belongs. Due to its proximity, it is a favourite target for astronomers to study stellar processes in spiral galaxies.
The population of stars in their prime is shown in this image in green hues, based on optical observations performed with the Wide Field Imager (WFI) on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at La Silla, Chile. Red colours indicate the glow of cosmic dust in the interstellar medium that pervades the galaxy: this information derives from infrared observations made with NASA’s Spitzer space telescope, and can be used to trace stellar nurseries and future stellar generations across NGC 300.
A complementary perspective on this galaxy’s composition comes from data collected in X-rays by ESA’s XMM-Newton space observatory, shown in blue. These represent the end points of the stellar life cycle, including massive stars on the verge of blasting out as supernovas, remnants of supernova explosions, neutron stars, and black holes. Many of these X-ray sources are located in NGC 300, while others – especially towards the edges of the image – are foreground objects in our own Galaxy, or background galaxies even farther away.
The sizeable blue blob immediately to the left of the galaxy’s centre is especially interesting, featuring two intriguing sources that are part of NGC 300 and shine brightly in X-rays.
One of them, known as NGC 300 X-1, is in fact a binary system, consisting of a Wolf-Rayet star – an ageing hot, massive and luminous type star that drives strong winds into its surroundings – and a black hole, the compact remains of what was once another massive, hot star. As matter from the star flows towards the black hole, it is heated up to temperatures of millions of degrees or more, causing it to shine in X-rays.
The other source, dubbed NGC 300 ULX1, was originally identified as a supernova explosion in 2010. However, later observations prompted astronomers to reconsider this interpretation, indicating that this source also conceals a binary system comprising a very massive star and a compact object – a neutron star or a black hole – feeding on material from its stellar companion.
Data obtained in 2016 with ESA’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s NuSTAR observatories revealed regular variations in the X-ray signal of NGC 300 ULX1, suggesting that the compact object in this binary system is a highly magnetized, rapidly spinning neutron star, or pulsar.
The large blue blob in the upper left corner is a much more distant object: a cluster of galaxies more than one billion light years away, whose X-ray glow is caused by the hot diffuse gas interspersed between the galaxies.
Credits: ESA/XMM-Newton (X-rays); MPG/ESO (optical); NASA/Spitzer (infrared). Acknowledgement: S. Carpano, Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics
The Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor – ASIM – is performing well outside the European Columbus laboratory module on the International Space Station.
Launched in April 2018, the space storm-hunter is a collection of optical cameras, photometers and an X- and gamma-ray detector designed to look for electrical discharges born in stormy weather conditions that extend above thunderstorms into the upper atmosphere.
These ‘transient luminous events’ sport names such as red sprites, blue jets and elves.
Satellites have probed them and observations have even been made from mountain tops but because they occur above thunderstorms they are difficult to study in greater detail from Earth.
In contrast, the International Space Station’s low orbit covers a large part of Earth along the equator and is ideally placed to capture the sprites and jets.
ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen managed to catch the elves and sprites in action during his 2015 mission on board the International Space Station.
Now months into its commissioning, ASIM is performing well. Using data continuously collected by ASIM, researchers are investigating the relationship between terrestrial gamma-ray bursts, lightning and high-altitude electric discharges across all seasons.
Aside from being a little-understood phenomenon and part of our world, these powerful electrical charges can reach high above the stratosphere and have implications for how our atmosphere protects us from radiation from space.
ASIM is keeping researchers busy. Data collected so far have prompted eight presentations so far at the December meeting of the American Geophysical Union, the largest international gathering of Earth and space scientists.
Learn more about ASIM and electric storms in the upper atmosphere with this infographic.
Credits: ESA
The James Webb Space Telescope lifted off on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, at 13:20 CET on 25 December on its exciting mission to unlock the secrets of the Universe.
Credits: ESA/CNES/Arianespace/Optique Vidéo du CSG - JM Guillon
As Mars exploration prepares for a rebirth, a European rover tunes up its gear for the challenges ahead.
Tomorrow, 23 July, ESA and dozens of industrial partners will assess the readiness of the ExoMars robotic explorer, named Rosalind Franklin, for a trip to the Red Planet in 2022. The European rover will drill down to two metres into the martian surface to sample the soil, analyse its composition and search for evidence of life buried underground.
The rover successfully proved that it is fit to endure the martian conditions during the environmental test campaign earlier this year in Toulouse, France. This laboratory on wheels withstood temperatures as low as –120°C and less than one hundredth of Earth’s atmospheric pressure to simulate the extremes of its journey through space and on the surface of Mars.
By the end of this week a more robust set of solar panels will begin its trip to reunite with the rover after some cracks were detected during those environmental tests. New fasteners are in place and will be on their way from the Airbus facilities in Stevenage, in the UK, to Thales Alenia Space in Turin, Italy, where the rover awaits power up at the beginning of August.
The disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic have added new obstacles for industry across Europe on the road to Mars. Parachute and interface tests are expected to resume in October.
New missions to Mars launch from a broad range of nations – while the United Arab Emirates’ historic first mission to Mars lifted off from Japan last Sunday, China is preparing to launch tomorrow its first rover to Mars, known as Tianwen-1. NASA’s Mars 2020 mission is set to take off with the Perseverance rover onboard next week, on July 30.
These missions focus on the search for evidence of life on the Red Planet and a better understanding of how Earth and Mars evolved so differently.
“We hope that ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover will help write a new page in Mars exploration by allowing us to study organic molecules on the spot,” says Jorge Vago, ESA’s ExoMars project scientist.
Dr Rosalind Franklin, the prominent scientist behind the discovery of the structure of DNA, one of life’s most important molecules, would have been 100 years old on 25 July this year. Her niece, also named Rosalind Franklin in her memory, points out that the X-ray diffraction expert “never conceived science as a race of competitors.”
After a visit to ESA’s technical centre in the Netherlands last year, Rosalind believes that her aunt would have loved the ExoMars team spirit. “The work of ESA engineers on the rover struck me – they really do it for the results, not for themselves. This what Rosalind Franklin was all about: commitment and dedication to science,” said Rosalind from her home in California, US.
A series of talks and events is taking place around the globe this week to celebrate the centenary of this “woman of integrity who went after scientific discovery for the betterment of humankind”, as her niece describes her. The legacy of the scientist lives on today, and the ExoMars rover will help leave her symbolic footprint on Mars in 2023.
The ExoMars rover is part of the ExoMars programme, a joint endeavour between ESA and the Russian State Space Corporation, Roscosmos.
Credits: Airbus
This image is packed full of galaxies! A keen eye can spot exquisite ellipticals and spectacular spirals, seen at various orientations: edge-on with the plane of the galaxy visible, face-on to show off magnificent spiral arms, and everything in between. The vast majority of these specks are galaxies, but to spot a foreground star from our own galaxy, you can look for a point of light with tell-tale diffraction spikes.
The most alluring subject sits at the centre of the frame. With the charming name of SDSSJ0146-0929, the glowing central bulge is a galaxy cluster — a monstrous collection of hundreds of galaxies all shackled together in the unyielding grip of gravity. The mass of this galaxy cluster is large enough to severely distort the spacetime around it, creating the odd, looping curves that almost encircle the cluster.
These graceful arcs are examples of a cosmic phenomenon known as an Einstein ring. The ring is created as the light from a distant objects, like galaxies, pass by an extremely large mass, like this galaxy cluster. In this image, the light from a background galaxy is diverted and distorted around the massive intervening cluster and forced to travel along many different light paths towards Earth, making it seem as though the galaxy is in several places at once.
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, CC BY 4.0
Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt
The ExoMars rover has a brand new control centre in one of Europe’s largest Mars yards. The Rover Operations Control Centre (ROCC) was inaugurated on 30 May 2019 in Turin, Italy, ahead of the rover’s exploration adventure on the Red Planet in 2021.
The control centre will be the operational hub that orchestrates the roaming of the European-built laboratory on wheels, named after Rosalind Franklin, upon arrival to the martian surface on Kazachok, the Russian surface platform.
The epicentre of the action for directing Mars surface operations on Earth is at the ALTEC premises in Turin, Italy. From here, engineers and scientists will work shoulder to shoulder at mission control, right next to a very special Mars yard.
Filled with 140 tonnes of soil, the Mars-like terrain has sandy areas and rocks of various sizes that will help rehearse possible mission scenarios.
Credits: ALTEC
The Rosette Nebula is a vast star-forming region, 100 light-years across, that lies at one end of a giant molecular cloud the constellation Monoceros. The nebula is estimated to contain around 10,000 solar masses. The nebula is located about 5,000 light-years away from Earth. Intense radiation from the young stars inside a cluster in the nebula causes the gasses to glow. The background image is from the Digitized Sky Survey, while the inset is a small portion of the nebula as photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope. Dark clouds of hydrogen gas laced with dust are silhouetted across the image. The colours come from the presence of hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen.
[Image description: A square, ground-based observation of the entire Rosette Nebula. A large, diffuse donut shape primarily composed of light brown and gray gas and dust extends to the edges. Several bright blue stars are at its clearer center. There are innumerable small stars throughout the background, most of which are blue. A tiny box at center-left connects to a zoomed-in image of this region at bottom left from the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble image shows a dark gray V that extends from just below top left all the way down to the lower right corner and back up toward the top right. It looks like thick, irregular smoke. Behind the dark gray on the left side there are arced lines in light orange and yellow. The background at top left is hazier, the blues covered in semi-transparent orange wisps, making a few sections appear green. In the bottom right, the background is bluer. There are a few bright red and purple stars scattered along the right half.]
Credits: NASA, ESA, STScI, DSS; CC BY 4.0
The Copernicus Sentinel-3A satellite takes us over the high, snow-studded Alps under clear skies.
The Alps extend 1200 km through eight different countries: France, Monaco, Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Germany, Austria and Slovenia. This mountain range, which is inhabited by some 20 million people, covers an area of approximately 200 000 sq km.
Captured on 16 February 2019, this true-colour image shows little clouds, particularly over the Alps and the surrounding flatter lands in southern France. There is an interesting contrast between this and the haze hanging over the Po valley in Italy, directly south of the Alps. The haze is most likely to be a mix of both fog and smog, trapped at the base of the Alps owing to both its topography and atmospheric conditions.
Patches of snow are also visible on the island of Corsica, to the left of mainland Italy, Croatia, to the right, and at the bottom of the Apennines in central Italy. Most of Italy’s rivers find their source in the Apennines, including the Tiber and the Arno.
The Adriatic Sea to the east of Italy is visible in turquoise, particularly the coastal area surrounding the Gargano National Park, jutting out. This light-green colour of the sea along the coast is likely to be caused by sediment carried into the sea by river discharge.
Directly to the right of the Alps, the image shows a pale-green Lake Neusiedl straddling the Austrian-Hungarian border. Neusiedl, meaning ‘swamp’ in Hungarian, is the largest endorheic lake in central Europe, meaning water flows into but not out of the lake, hence its size and level frequently fluctuates. It is a popular area for windsurfing, sailing and spotting the woolly Mangalica pig.
To the right, the freshwater Lake Balaton is visible, and is the largest lake in central Europe. It stretches for over 75 km in the southern foothills of Hungary. Its striking emerald-green colour is probably down to the presence of algae that grow in the shallow waters.
Sentinel-3 is a two-satellite mission to supply the coverage and data delivery needed for Europe’s Copernicus environmental monitoring programme. The mission provides critical information for a range of applications from marine observations to large-area vegetation monitoring. The satellite’s instrument package includes an optical sensor to monitor changes in the colour of Earth’s surfaces.
This image is also featured on the Earth from Space video programme.
Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2018), processed by ESA,CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) is ready for fuelling. This image shows the spacecraft leaving the Payload Preparation Facility and being transferred to the Hazardous Processing Facility, where the fuelling operations will take place. This marks a major milestone in the launch campaign. Launch is planned for mid-April.
Juice is humankind’s next bold mission to the outer Solar System. It will make detailed observations of gas giant Jupiter and its three large ocean-bearing moons: Ganymede, Callisto and Europa. This ambitious mission will characterise these moons with a powerful suite of remote sensing, geophysical and in situ instruments to discover more about these compelling destinations as potential habitats for past or present life. Juice will monitor Jupiter’s complex magnetic, radiation and plasma environment in depth and its interplay with the moons, studying the Jupiter system as an archetype for gas giant systems across the Universe.
Find out more about Juice in ESA’s launch kit
Credits: ESA/CNES/Arianespace/Optique video du CSG – P. Baudon
A three-dimensional rendering of the Nereidum Mountain Range in the southern hemisphere of Mars created from data captured by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on ESA's Mars Express orbiter in 2015. The rendering shows a dune field and two large craters with a canyon between them viewed from the west. The rendering was generated by the combination of data from the Mars digital terrain model (DTM), the nadir (downward-looking) channel and the colour channels of the HRSC instrument.
Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
‘Twas the day before launch and all across the globe, people await liftoff for Artemis I with hope.
NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the Orion spacecraft with its European Service Module, is seen here on Launch Pad 39B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA, on 12 November.
After much anticipation, NASA launch authorities have given the GO for the first opportunity for launch: tomorrow, 16 November with a two-hour launch window starting at 07:04 CET (06:04 GMT, 1:04 local time).
Artemis I is the first mission in a large programme to send astronauts around and on the Moon sustainably. This uncrewed first launch will see the Orion spacecraft travel to the Moon, enter an elongated orbit around our satellite and then return to Earth, powered by the European-built service module that supplies electricity, propulsion, fuel, water and air as well as keeping the spacecraft operating at the right temperature.
The European Service Modules are made from components supplied by over 20 companies in ten ESA Member States and USA. As the first European Service Module sits atop the SLS rocket on the launchpad, the second is only 8 km away being integrated with the Orion crew capsule for the first crewed mission – Artemis II. The third and fourth European Service Modules – that will power astronauts to a Moon landing – are in production in Bremen, Germany.
With a 16 November launch, the three-week Artemis I mission would end on 11 December with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. The European Service Module detaches from the Orion Crew Module before splashdown and burns up harmlessly in the atmosphere, its job complete after taking Orion to the Moon and back safely.
Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja
This image from ESA’s Mars Express shows a dried-up river valley on Mars named Nirgal Vallis. It comprises data gathered on 16 November 2018 during Mars Express Orbit 18818. The ground resolution is approximately 14 m/pixel and the images are centred at about 315°E/27°S. This image was created using data from the nadir and colour channels of the High Resolution Stereo Camera. The nadir channel is aligned perpendicular to the surface of Mars, as if looking straight down at the surface. North is to the right.
Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
This view was generated from the digital terrain model and the nadir and colour channels of the High Resolution Stereo Camera on ESA’s Mars Express. It shows a bird’s-eye view of the Idaeus Fossae region of Mars – a region with layers of dark volcanic minerals, steep rocky outcrops, and an intriguing example of a butterfly crater.
[Image description: A reddish-brown, rocky surface of Mars with a large circular crater dominating the centre. The crater has steep, jagged edges and a shadowed interior, suggesting depth. Surrounding the crater is a flat, dusty plain scattered with smaller impact craters. The terrain appears dry and barren, with subtle ridges and textures across the surface.]
Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
This true color image was created from @NASA Cassini's raw images in red, green & blue filters, taken on Oct. 28, 2016.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Mindaugas Macijauskas
Space Science image of the week:
ESA’s Integral space observatory has been orbiting Earth for 15 years, observing the ever-changing, powerful and violent cosmos in gamma rays, X-rays and visible light. Studying stars exploding as supernovas, monster black holes and, more recently, even gamma-rays that were associated with gravitational waves, Integral continues to broaden our understanding of the high-energy Universe.
This image visualises the orbits of the spacecraft since its launch on 17 October 2002, until October of this year.
Integral travels in a highly eccentric orbit. Over time, the closest and furthest points have changed, as has the plane of the orbit. The orbit brought it to within 2756 km of Earth at its closest, on 25 October 2011, to 159 967 km at the furthest, two days later.
This kind of orbit provides long periods of uninterrupted observations with nearly constant background away from the radiation belts around Earth that would otherwise interfere with the satellite’s sensitive measurements.
In 2015, spacecraft operators conducted four thruster burns carefully designed to ensure that the satellite’s eventual entry into the atmosphere in 2029 will meet the Agency’s guidelines for minimising space debris. Making these disposal manoeuvres so early also minimises fuel usage, allowing ESA to exploit the satellite’s lifetime to the fullest.
The orbital changes introduced during these manoeuvres are seen in the wide-spaced orbits to the left of the image, highlighted in white in this annotated version of the image.
Watch a movie showing Integral's orbits
Find out more about Integral in this infographic
Credit: ESA/ScienceOffice.org, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, Juice, being installed on a ‘multi-purpose trolley’ in the Rosetta clean room at the European Space Research and Technology Centre, ESTEC in the Netherlands on 30 April. The multi-purpose trolley allows the spacecraft to be rotated and titled, providing better access to the engineers for integration operations and preparation for testing, and in general to facilitate the work on the different sides of the spacecraft. The trolley is made of non-magnetic material, to comply to the strict magnetic cleanliness requirements of the spacecraft.
Once in the Jovian system the mission will spend at least three years making detailed observations of the giant gaseous planet Jupiter and its three large ocean-bearing moons: Ganymede, Callisto and Europa.
Credits: ESA-SJM Photography
Europe shines brightly at night, as seen in this mosaic created from over 7000 pictures taken by astronauts on the International Space Station. This is the first nighttime mosaic of Europe in colour ever produced with calibrated space images.
The composition uses images from 2017 with a resolution of around 100 metres per pixel. Until 2021, the International Space Station was the only spacecraft suitable for capturing colour images of Earth at night. Resolution is equally important: astronauts were able to capture images at five metres per pixel, exceeding the capabilities that most satellites can currently offer.
Astronaut photography has emerged as the best source for scientists to map artificial light. All space agencies and their crews contribute to the effort, with ESA astronauts playing a vital role since Paolo Nespoli became one of the pioneers of nighttime photography from space in 2010.
“Most of the images that you see of Europe at night are artistic interpretations of black and white images, not real colour,” explains Alejandro Sánchez de Miguel from the Complutense University of Madrid and the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Spain.
By combining citizen science with artificial intelligence, the Cities at Night project created the mosaic by processing thousands of images and time-lapses, and correcting distortions in them. The missing patches at the bottom (north of Africa) and top (Scotland in the UK) of this mosaic are filled with data from NASA’s weather satellite Suomi NPP.
Different colours represent different lighting technologies, with warmer, redder tones generally indicating sodium light sources. The whiter and bluer emissions belong to light-emitting diode lamps, or LED technology, in our streets. The whitening of artificial light can be seen in this comparison between 2017 and 2022.
According to scientists, the transition towards white and blue-rich light radiation is eroding the natural nighttime cycles across the continent. Excessive lighting disrupts the circadian day-and-night rhythm of living organisms, including humans, with negative health effects on species and whole ecosystems.
A scientific study identified three major negative impacts: the suppression of melatonin, the response of insects and bats towards or away from light, and the visibility of stars in the night sky.
“Astronaut photography allows us to look back in time at global light pollution during periods when no colour-sensitive satellites existed,” adds Alejandro.
As part of the Plan-B project to protect our biodiversity and ecosystems, Cities at Night will release an app in 2026 that will allow Europeans to check how light pollution has evolved over time where they live.
Credits: ESA/NASA/Cities at Night
Kiruna, the northernmost town in Sweden, is featured in this snowy image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission.
Kiruna, visible in darker tones just left of the centre in the image, is located in the county of Norrbotten and is around 145 km north of the Arctic Circle. The city, with a population of around 22 000 inhabitants, is on the eastern shore of Lake Luossa (Luossajärvi), between the iron-ore Kiruna (Kiirunavaara) and Luossa (Luossavaara) mountains.
Around 20 km east of Kiruna, the small town of Jukkasjärvi is visible, and is best known for its annual ice hotel constructed from snow and ice blocks taken from the nearby Torne River. Thin, dark lines cutting across the image are roads that connect the towns with other parts of Sweden.
At a latitude of almost 68°, around 40 km east of Kiruna, lies ESA’s Kiruna ground station, which in September 2020 celebrated 30 years of space excellence. The station is hard to spot, but is located in the centre-right of the image, just above a dark lake.
Ideally positioned to support polar-orbiting missions, the station is a crucial gateway for much of the data enabling us to study our planet’s oceans, water and atmosphere, forecast weather and understand the rapid advance of climate change.
Kiruna ground station is part of the Agency’s tracking station network – Estrack – a worldwide network linking satellites in orbit and across the Solar System with ESA’s Space Operations Centre, ESOC, in Darmstadt, Germany. The station features two sophisticated terminals with 15 m and 13 m-diameter antennas to communicate with satellites in Earth’s orbit, including CryoSat, Swarm, Copernicus Sentinel-1 and the recently-launched Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite.
While the North Pole Satellite Station in Alaska caught the spacecraft’s first signals from space after separation from the launcher, the Kiruna ground station tracked the satellite’s first days. Eumetsat then completed the final ‘orbit acquisition,’ taking over responsibility for commissioning, routine operations and distribution of the mission’s vital data.
While Sentinel-6 is one of the European Union’s family of Copernicus missions, its implementation is the result of the unique collaboration between ESA, NASA, Eumetsat and NOAA, with contribution from the French space agency CNES.
This image, captured on 27 May 2020, is also featured on the Earth from Space video programme
.
Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2020), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
ESA's astronaut candidates of the class of 2022 at the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany.
The five candidates are Sophie Adenot, Pablo Álvarez Fernández, Rosemary Coogan, Raphaël Liégeois, and Marco Sieber. The group is part of the 17-member astronaut class of 2022, selected from 22 500 applicants from across ESA Member States.
The astronaut candidates will be trained to the highest level for future space missions. Basic training includes learning about space exploration, technical and scientific disciplines, space systems and operations, as well as spacewalks and survival training.
Credits: ESA - P. Sebirot
Copernicus Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich atop a Falcon 9 rocket at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, US. Once launched, this new mission will take the role of radar altimetry reference mission, continuing the long-term record of measurements of sea-surface height started in 1992 by the French–US Topex Poseidon and then the Jason series of satellite missions.
Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja
Within a galaxy hosting around 300 billion stars, here the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured a mere handful or two — just about enough to form a single football team. These stellar “teammates” play under the banner of NGC 1333, the cloud of gas and dust which formed them and that they continue to call home.
NGC 1333 is located about 1000 light-years away in the constellation of Perseus (The Hero). The cool gas and dust concentrated in this region is generating new stars whose light is then reflecting off the surrounding material, lighting it up and making this object’s lingering presence known to us. NGC 1333 is accordingly classified as a reflection nebula.
This image shows just a single region of NGC 1333. Hubble has imaged NGC 1333 more widely before, revealing that the smattering of stars seen here has ample company. Seen in a broader context, this team of stars is but one gathering amongst many in NGC 1333’s celestial Champions League.
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, K. Stapelfeldt; CC BY 4.0
Marine plastic litter was dumped into a realistic scale model of the Atlantic Ocean to test if space technologies would be able to detect it from orbit.
The best estimate is that an average 10 million tons of plastic enter the ocean annually – equivalent to a fresh truckload of plastic dumped every minute – but researchers only know what happens to about 1% of it. Satellite monitoring might in future help track its extent, and see where it goes – if it can be proven to work in practice.
“Our goal here is to answer a few fundamental questions,” says ESA antenna engineer Peter de Maagt, overseeing the campaign.
“To start with, can we detect floating plastics with space-based monitoring at all? And if so, which techniques show the most promise, at what frequency and with what sensitivity? Up until now researchers have had general gut feelings about what might work the best, but we are working to remove any guesswork.”
The test campaign took place at the Deltares research institute near Delft in the Netherlands, inside its mammoth Atlantic Basin Facility.
Anton de Fockert, flow expert from Deltares, explains: “This one of a kind 650 sq. m. facility is equipped with wave generators to create realistic deep water waves which can be found in the ocean.”
Peter notes: “We decided to make this facility available to various European groups researching different satellite methods to identify marine plastic litter.The teams were recruited through ESA’s Open Space Innovation Platform, OSIP, seeking novel ideas for new space research activities.”
Anton de Fockert adds: “The plastic used in the basin included material previously recovered from the sea through cleanup campaigns by Stichting de Noordzee and Schone Rivieren as well as ‘fresh’ samples.”
For maximum realism, the plastic placed into the basin took the form of popular items found at sea, such as bags, bottles, marine nets and ropes, cutlery and Styrofoam balls. Additional non-plastic items were also added – to better mimic actual distribution found at sea – including cigarette ends.
“This first test campaign lasted for two weeks, plus an initial week for setup,” says Peter. “We started simple with a lot of floating plastic and no waves, moving to reducing the overall plastic amount as we began with gentle waves, then made them progressively bigger.”
Monitoring from above the facility were the participating teams, plus their specialist instrumentation, intended to simulate observations from space.
Teams from the Institute for Telecommunications in Portugal and the University of Stirling in Scotland employed radar remote sensing. Spain’s Polytechnic University of Catalonia made use of ‘GNSS reflectometry’, which relies on reflected signals from navigation satellites. A group from the University of Oldenburg in Germany deployed optical instrumentation.
Meanwhile a combined team from the University of Alberta in Canada and Technical University Delft in the Netherlands performed fundamental physic analyses – including attempting to better quantify the wave-damping effect of marine plastic litter, which might be harnessed to estimate plastic concentrations in the future.
“We’re now processing our data,” explains Peter. “The initial results look promising, meaning that under certain circumstances the teams did receive useable signals, but there is a lot of analysis still to be performed. We aim to use the time between this test campaign and the follow-up, due to take place early next year, to identify gaps in knowledge that need further focus.”
This project is part of a larger OSIP campaign on marine plastic litter, supported through ESA’s Discovery and Preparation programme, underseeing basic research that lays the ground for future Agency missions.
Watch our full-length Planet Aqua documentary on space technologies for water management, including marine plastic litter detection, hosted by ESA astronaut André Kuipers.
Credits: ESA-P. de Maagt
This image, acquired by the LASCO C2 coronagraph instrument on the ESA-NASA SOHO spacecraft, was taken 8 January 2002 and shows a widely spreading coronal mass ejection (CME) as it blasts more than a billion tons of matter out into space at millions of kilometers per hour.
This C2 image was turned 90 degrees so that the blast seems to be pointing down. A second image, from the EIT disk imager on a different day was enlarged and superimposed on the C2 image so that it filled the occulting disk for effect.
Credits: ESA/NASA/Soho
Europe' Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana is gearing up for the arrival of Ariane 6, Europe's new generation launch vehicle.
Aerial views from December 2021 show the main elements of the new Ariane 6 launch complex: the launch vehicle assembly building, the mobile gantry, and launch pad.
Ariane 6 has two versions depending on the required performance and will be capable of a wide range of missions to guarantee Europe’s independent access to space.
Credits: CNES-ESA/Sentinel
Multiple integrated circuits destined to serve as the brains of Europe’s future space missions, etched together onto single pieces of silicon.
These 20-cm diameter wafers each contain 35 replicas of five different space chips, each incorporating as many as 10 million transistors or basic circuit switches.
Laid down within a microchip, these designs endow a space mission with the ability to perform various specialised tasks such as data handling, communications processing or attitude control.
To save money on the high cost of fabrication, various chips designed by different companies and destined for multiple ESA projects are crammed onto the same silicon wafers, etched into place at specialised semiconductor manufacturing plants.
Subjected to various testing procedures the chips on the wafer are chopped up and packaged for use, then mounted on printed circuit boards for connection with other microelectronic components aboard a satellite. Visitors to ESA’s ESTEC technical centre can see some of these silicon wafers exhibited along the establishment’s main corridor.
Since 2002, ESA’s Microelectronics section has maintained a catalogue of ‘building blocks’ for chip designs, known as intellectual property cores, available to European industry through ESA licence. For more information, check this recently updated overview of which ESA IP cores are available and how they can be requested and licenced.
Credits: ESA - Agustin Fernandez-Leon
In this image, Plato is situated on top of ESA’s QUAD shaker to simulate the vibrations encountered during launch. This test was essential to make sure Plato can survive the first two minutes of launch, during which the most extreme vibrations are encountered.
[Image description: An engineer looks upon the structural model of Plato, placed on top of the QUAD shaker at ESA’s ESTEC Test Centre. The engineer wears a lab coat and a hair net. Plato’s structural model is twice as high as the person and its upper part has 26 cylindrical shaped cameras attached. Plato sits on top of an octagonal-shaped shaker built into the floor.]
Credits: ESA/ G. Porter
Part of Lake Nasser, one of the largest artificial lakes in the world, is featured in this false-colour image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission.
Lake Nasser, visible in the lower-right in black, is a vast lake and reservoir located in southern Egypt and northern Sudan. The lake was created as a result of the construction of the Aswan High Dam across the waters of the Nile in the late-1960s. This ambitious project was designed to provide irrigation to new agricultural developments and attract people to the region.
The dam is located around 200 km northeast of the area pictured here and cannot be seen. The dam impounds floodwaters from the Nile, releasing them when needed to maximise their utility on irrigated land, to water hundreds of thousands of hectares of land downstream, but also in the nearby area. The dam also helps improve navigation through Aswān and generates an enormous amount of hydroelectric power. The lake covers a total surface area of 5250 sq km, yet is relatively shallow with an average depth of 25 m.
The ancient Egyptian temple of Abu Simbel laid in the path of the rising waters produced by the dam, resulting in the relocation of the temple complex. In the 1960s, the historical site was taken apart piece by piece and reassembled in a new location to avoid submersion. Although the resolution of the image doesn’t allow us to see the temple in detail, the town of Abu Simbel and its airport can be spotted at the bottom of the image, close to several plantations seen in red.
Part of the Toshka Lakes, natural depressions that are filled by overflow from Lake Nasser, can be seen in the top-left of the image. These endorheic lakes were created in the 1980s and 1990s by the diversion of water from Lake Nasser through the manmade canal visible in green in the image.
The rise and fall of the lakes depend on multi-year fluctuations in water flow from the Nile. From 2012 to 2018, the lakes had shrunk significantly, leaving only small remnants of water in the basins. Summer rainfall in Sudan in 2019 and record-breaking floods in 2020, resulted in the rapid filling of the lake’s waters. The lakes are relatively salty, with visible signs of eutrophication and algae formation.
This image is a false-colour composite and was created by utilising the near-infrared channel from Copernicus Sentinel-2 to emphasise the scarce vegetation in the area. This helps identify the presence of pivot irrigation fields, visible as circular shapes in the image, with the largest having a diameter of around 750 m.
Pivot irrigation systems work where watering equipment rotates around a fixed water supply point and crops are watered with sprinklers. This type of irrigation helps farmers manage their watering demands and conserve their water sources.
The image is also featured on the Earth from Space video programme.
Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2022), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
As if this Hubble Space Telescope picture isn't cluttered enough with myriad galaxies, nearby asteroids photobomb the image, their trails sometimes mimicking background astronomical phenomena.
The stunningly beautiful galaxy cluster Abell 370 contains an astounding assortment of several hundred galaxies tied together by the mutual pull of gravity. Located approximately four billion light years away in the constellation Cetus, the Sea Monster, this immense cluster is a rich mix of a variety of galaxy shapes.
Entangled among the galaxies are thin, white trails that look like curved or S-shaped streaks. These are trails from asteroids that reside, on average, only about 260 million kilometres from Earth – right around the corner in astronomical terms. The trails appear in multiple Hubble exposures that have been combined into one image. Of the 22 total asteroid sightings for this field, five are unique objects. These asteroids are so faint that they were not previously identified.
The asteroid trails look curved due to an observational effect called parallax. As Hubble orbits around Earth, an asteroid will appear to move along an arc with respect to the vastly more distant background stars and galaxies. The motion of Earth around the Sun, and the motion of the asteroids along their orbits, are other contributing factors to the apparent skewing of asteroid paths.
All the asteroids were found manually, the majority by “blinking” consecutive exposures to capture apparent asteroid motion. Astronomers found a unique asteroid for every 10 to 20 hours of exposure time.
These asteroid trails should not be confused with the mysterious-looking arcs of blue light that are actually distorted images of distant galaxies behind the cluster. Many of these far-flung galaxies are too faint for Hubble to see directly. Instead, in a dramatic example of “gravitational lensing,” the cluster functions as a natural telescope, warping space and affecting light traveling through the cluster toward Earth.
The study was part of the Frontier Fields program and the image, assembled from several exposures taken in visible and infrared light, was first published on 6 November 2017.
The field’s position on the sky is near the ecliptic, the plane of our Solar System. This is the zone in which most asteroids reside, which is why Hubble astronomers saw so many crossings. Hubble deep-sky observations taken along a line-of-sight near the plane of our Solar System commonly record asteroid trails.
Every year on 30 June, the global “Asteroid Day” event takes place to raise awareness about asteroids and what can be done to protect Earth from possible impact. The day falls on the anniversary of the Tunguska event that took place on 30 June 1908, the most harmful known asteroid related event in recent history. This year, ESA is co-hosting a live webcast with the European Southern Observatory packed with expert interviews, news on some of the most recent asteroid science results, and the truth about the dinosaurs. Watch 30 June at 13:00 CEST via our Asteroid Day website.
Credits: NASA, ESA, and B. Sunnquist and J. Mack (STScI) Acknowledgment: NASA, ESA, and J. Lotz (STScI) and the HFF Team, CC BY 4.0
Infographics with the launch sequence and launcher details for the European Robotic Arm.
The European Robotic Arm is the first robot that can ‘walk’ around the Russian part of the International Space Station.
ERA has a length of over 11 m, and can anchor itself to the Station in multiple locations, moving backwards and forwards around the Russian segment with a large range of motion. Its home base will be the Multipurpose Laboratory Module, also called ‘Nauka’.
Astronauts will find in the European Robotic Arm a most valuable ally – it will save them precious time to do other work in space.
The crew in space can control ERA from both inside and outside the Space Station, a feature that no other robotic arm has offered before.
100% made-in-Europe, this intelligent robotic arm consists of two end effectors, two wrists, two limbs and one elbow joint together with electronics and cameras. Both ends act as either a 'hand' for the robot.
Credits: ESA
This unnamed crater on Mars is filled with material of a ‘wrinkled’ appearance. This texture usually implies that material once flowed here, and likely comprised a mixing of rocks, ice or frost, and other soil deposits. The wrinkles seem to have formed in parallel layers which is consistent with material settling onto the crater floor, perhaps in different episodes. Volatiles such as water ice could still be mixed with the rocky sediments to create the observed texture.
The image was captured by the CaSSIS camera onboard the ESA/Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter on 3 July 2019. The image is centred at 35ºN/169.5ºE. North is up.
Credits: ESA/Roscosmos/CaSSIS, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
This perspective view shows Eumenides Dorsum, part of Mars’s Medusae Fossae Formation (MFF). The MFF consists of a series of wind-sculpted deposits measuring hundreds of kilometres across and several kilometres high. Found at the boundary between Mars’s highlands and lowlands, the deposits are possibly the biggest single source of dust on Mars, and one of the most extensive deposits on the planet.
But this dust seems to hide a secret. Over 15 years ago, ESA’s Mars Express studied the MFF, revealing that the dust covered massive deposits up to 2.5 km deep. From these early observations, it was unclear what the deposits were made of. A team of researchers has now explored the MFF again using newer Mars Express radar data and found the deposits to be even thicker than previously thought: up to 3.7 km thick. And now it’s clear that these radar signals match what we’d expect to see from layered deposits rich in water ice.
If melted, the ice locked up in the MFF would cover the entire planet in a layer of water 1.5 to 2.7 m deep: the most water ever found in this part of Mars, and enough to fill Earth’s Red Sea.
[Image description: Greyscale image of a planetary surface. Hills, valleys and craters cover the surface.]
Credits: Caltech/JPL Global CTX Mosaic of Mars/Smithsonian Institution
As a month of celebrating 20 years of continuous human habitation of the International Space Station draws to a close, we look back on the first mission of the next ESA astronaut to travel to the Space Station, Thomas Pesquet.
The ESA astronaut of French nationality lived and worked on the Space Station for 196 days during his first mission, Proxima, between November 2016 and June 2017. Thomas is one of 18 European astronauts to have spent time on board and will return for his Alpha mission
in spring 2021.
Thomas is seen here working in the European Columbus laboratory that was launched to the Station in February 2008.
The Columbus laboratory is Europe’s largest single contribution to the International Space Station. Permanently attached to the Harmony module, this pressurised laboratory allows researchers on the ground, aided by the Station’s crew, to conduct a wide variety of research in a weightless environment.
Experiments in space science, Earth observation and technology can also be conducted outside the module, thanks to four exterior mounting platforms that are exposed to the vacuum of space. Room outside Columbus for commercial experiments is also on its way, with the Bartolomeoservices due to begin operations soon.
During his upcoming Alpha mission, Thomas will continue this research and experimentation on the International Space Station supported by his crewmates and ground teams from ESA, the US space agency NASA, Russian space agency Roscosmos, the Canadian Space Agency and the Japanese space agency JAXA.
This enduring international partnership is a key feature of the Space Station as nations work across cultures and borders, performing science, research and engineering that has led to breakthroughs in disease research, materials science, Earth observation, our understanding of Earth’s origins and more.
This work helps humankind explore even farther while enhancing life here on Earth – setting Europe in good stead for its journey forward, beyond low Earth orbit to the Moon.
Credits: ESA/NASA
This image was captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission on 6 June 2022 and shows the latest activity in Italy’s Mount Etna – one of the world’s most active volcano. The image has been processed using the mission’s shortwave-infrared band to show the ongoing activity in the crater.
Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2022), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
This image shows Medusae Fossae, the largest sedimentary deposit on Mars and an intensely wind-sculpted landscape, in wider context.
The area outlined by the bold white box indicates the area imaged by the Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera on 14 May 2021 during orbit 21948.
Credits: NASA/MGS/MOLA Science Team
Today’s ESA/Hubble Picture of the Week brings a distant stellar birthplace into focus. This gigantic cloud of cold hydrogen gas is called N159, and it’s located about 160 000 light-years away in the constellation Dorado. N159 is one of the most massive star-forming clouds in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that is the largest of the small galaxies that orbit the Milky Way.
This image shows just a portion of the N159 star-forming complex. The entire complex stretches over 150 light-years across. To put that into perspective, 150 light-years is nearly 10 million times the distance between Earth and the Sun!
In the subzero interior of this gas cloud, subjected to the crushing pressure of gravity, young stars begin to gleam in the darkness. Particularly hot and high-mass stars illuminate their birthplaces with red light. This red glow is characteristic of excited hydrogen atoms, to which Hubble is exquisitely sensitive.
Though some of the bright stars in the cloud appear to be blanketed with reddish gas, others seem to lie at the centre of a reddish bubble, through which the dark backdrop of space is visible. These bubbles are evidence of stellar feedback, in which young stars fry their habitats with high-energy radiation and blow bubbles with their intense stellar winds.
A previous Hubble image of the full N159 star-forming cloud was released in 2016. This version incorporates an additional wavelength of light to highlight the hot gas that surrounds newborn stars.
[Image Description: A field filled with stars and covered by clouds of gas and dust. The centre and left side are totally blanketed with billowing, bright red clouds. They are opaque some places — showing clusters of stars forming within — and transparent others. Small patches are dark black in colour, while a large cloud below the centre is mostly pale blue. The right side of the view, mostly gas-free, glitters with stars near and far.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Indebetouw; CC BY 4.0
This turbulent celestial palette of purple and yellow shows a bubble of gas named NGC 3199, blown by a star known as WR18 (Wolf-Rayet 18).
Wolf-Rayet stars are massive, powerful, and energetic stars that are just about reaching the end of their lives. They flood their surroundings with thick, intense, fast-moving winds that push and sweep at the material found there, carving out weird and wonderful shapes as they do so. These winds can create strong shockwaves when they collide with the comparatively cool interstellar medium, causing them to heat up anything in their vicinity. This process can heat material to such high temperatures that it is capable of emitting X-rays, a type of radiation emitted only by highly energetic phenomena in the Universe.
This is what has happened in the case of NGC 3199. Although this kind of scenario has been seen before, it is still relatively rare; only three other Wolf-Rayet bubbles have been seen to emit X-rays (NGC 2359, NGC 6888, and S308). WR18 is thought to be a star with especially powerful winds; once it has run out of material to fuel these substantial winds it will explode violently as a supernova, creating a final breath-taking blast as it ends its stellar life.
This image was taken by the European Photon Imaging Camera (EPIC) on ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray space observatory, and marks different patches of gas in different colours. The incredibly hot, diffuse, X-ray-emitting gas within the Wolf-Rayet bubble is shown in blue, while a bright arc that is visible in the optical part of the spectrum is traced out in shades of yellow-green (oxygen emission) and red (sulphur emission).
This blue and yellow-green component forms an optical nebula – a glowing cloud of dust and ionised gases – that stretches out towards the western end of the X-ray bubble (in this image, North is to the upper left). This lopsided arc caused astronomers to previously identify WR18 as a so-called runaway star moving far faster than expected in relation to its surroundings, but more recent studies have shown that the observed X-ray emission does not support this idea. Instead, the shape of NGC 3199 is thought to be due to variations in the chemistry of the bubble’s surroundings, and the initial configuration of the interstellar medium around WR18.
Explore this object in ESASky.
Credits: ESA/XMM-Newton; J. Toalá; D.Goldman
One of the closest planetary nebulas to Earth, the Helix Nebula has become a favorite among astronomers using ground- and space-based telescopes to study the final moments of a dying star in detail. The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has now zoomed in this familiar object, offering the clearest infrared look yet.
This gives us an up-close view of the possible eventual fate of our own Sun and planetary system. In Webb’s high-resolution look, the structure of the gas being shed off by a dying star comes into full focus. The image is more than just striking, it reveals how stars recycle their material back into the cosmos, seeding future generations of stars and planets.
In the image from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera), pillars that look like comets with extended tails trace the circumference of the inner region of an expanding shell of gas. Here, blistering winds of hot gas from the dying star are crashing into colder shells of dust and gas that were shed earlier in its life, sculpting the nebula’s remarkable structure. This happens when a lighter, faster-moving material pushes into a heavier, slower-moving one, like oil trying to push through water.
The iconic Helix Nebula has been imaged by many ground- and space-based observatories over the nearly two centuries since it was discovered. Webb’s near-infrared view of the target brings these knots to the forefront compared to the ethereal image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Additionally, the new near-infrared look shows the stark transition between the hottest gas to the coolest gas as the shell expands out from the central white dwarf.
This blazing white dwarf, the leftover core of the dying star, lies right at the heart of the nebula, out of the frame of the Webb image. Its intense radiation lights up the surrounding gas, creating a rainbow of features: hot ionized gas near the center (the top of the Webb image), cooler molecular hydrogen farther out, and protective pockets where more complex molecules can begin to form within dust clouds. This interaction is vital, as it’s the raw material from which new planets may one day form in other star systems.
In Webb’s image of the Helix Nebula, color represents this temperature and chemistry. A touch of a blue hue marks the hottest gas in this field, energized by intense ultraviolet light. Farther out, the gas cools into the yellow regions where hydrogen atoms join into molecules. At the outer edges, the reddish tones trace the coolest material, where gas begins to thin and dust can take shape. Together, the colors show the star’ s final breath transforming into the raw ingredients for new worlds, adding to the wealth of knowledge gained from Webb about the origin of planets.
The Helix Nebula is located 650 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Aquarius. It remains a favorite among stargazers and professional astronomers alike due to its relative proximity to Earth, and striking appearance.
[Image description: A closeup of a small section of the Helix Nebula, an expanding shell of gas and dust. Thousands of orange and gold comet-like pillars stream upward from the bottom, like thin liquid blown up a sheet of glass. These pillars are around the circumference of the arced shell, which forms a partial orange semi-circle at the bottom. The pillars are more numerous and denser at the bottom, and darker red. They fade to orange and then yellow in the arc. In the top two-thirds, they are thinner and more golden, and it’s easier to see the black background of space. Several bright blue stars, some with diffraction spikes, are scattered throughout. A few larger stars are on the right side.]
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, A. Pagan (STScI); CC BY 4.0
This week Earth from Space features a wintery image: a red and white sphere that, if seen from a distance, resembles a festive decoration.
The ‘bauble’ in question is actually the Manicouagan crater in the Canadian province of Quebec. Visible from space, this round structure was formed by a giant asteroid impact some 214 million years ago.
The anular reservoir, with René-Levasseur Island at its centre, is some 700 km north-east of Quebec City. Sometimes referred to as the ‘eye of Quebec’, it spans 72 km from east to west, while the asteroid that caused the impact is thought to have been 5 km in diameter.
The reservoir, also known as Manicouagan lake, was created in the 1960s as part of a hydroelectric project to provide hydropower across the province. The Manicouagan river is visible at the bottom of the image as it leaves the reservoir.
This false-colour image was captured by Copernicus Sentinel-2. The instruments on board the Sentinel-2 satellites are high-resolution multispectral imagers with 13 spectral bands. They provide high-resolution images to within 10 m.
In this image, the white is actually snow. Frozen lake water – visible across the image if you zoom in, particularly on René-Levasseur Island – is shown in blue. The area’s thick vegetation, shown in red, includes boreal forest and tundra that are part of a UNESCO-designated biosphere reserve.
Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2022), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Copernicus Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich safely tucked up in the Falcon 9 rocket fairing being rolled out to the launch pad at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, US. Once launched, this new mission will take the role of radar altimetry reference mission, continuing the long-term record of measurements of sea-surface height started in 1992 by the French–US Topex Poseidon and then the Jason series of satellite missions.
Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja
The subject of the latest Hubble Picture of the Week is a stormy and highly active spiral galaxy named NGC 1792. Located over 50 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Columba (the Dove), the bright glow of the galaxy’s centre is offset by the flocculent and sparkling spiral arms swirling around it.
NGC 1792 is just as fascinating to astronomers as its chaotic look might imply. Classified as a starburst galaxy, it is a powerhouse of star formation, with spiral arms rich in star-forming regions. In fact, it is surprisingly luminous for its mass. The galaxy is close to a larger neighbour, NGC 1808, and the strong gravitational interaction between the two is believed to be what has stirred up the reserves of gas in this galaxy. The result is a torrent of star formation, concentrated on the side where gravity has a stronger effect. It’s a perfect target for astronomers seeking to understand the complex interactions between gas, star clusters and supernovae in galaxies.
Hubble has shown off this galaxy before, in 2020. This week’s new image includes additional data collected throughout 2025, providing a deeper view of the tumultuous astrophysical activity taking place in the galaxy. Blossoming red lights in the arms mark out so-called H-alpha emission from dense clouds of hydrogen molecules. Stars form within these clouds and shine powerfully with ultraviolet radiation. They ionise the gas around them, causing the gas to emit a very particular red wavelength of light — a tell-tale sign of new stars.
[Image Description: A spiral galaxy, seen partly from the side, with a messy, turbulent appearance. Its disc is made of multiple patchy arms that contain numerous sparkling blue and glowing red regions — star clusters and star-forming nebulae. Thick clumps of dark reddish dust swirl through the disc. The glow of the disc extends out into the dark background, where both distant and nearby stars can be seen.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker, F. Belfiore, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team; CC BY 4.0