Articles about 'European Space Agency'

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

Last starlight for ground-breaking Gaia

15 January 2025

The European Space Agency’s Milky Way-mapper Gaia has completed the sky-scanning phase of its mission, racking up more than three trillion observations of about two billion stars and other objects over the last decade to revolutionise the view of our home galaxy and cosmic neighbourhood.

The environment of the galaxy system ZS7 from the JWST PRIMER programme as seen by Webb's NIRCam instrument.

Webb detects most distant black hole merger to date

16 May 2024

An international team of astronomers, led by the University of Cambridge, has used the James Webb Space Telescope to find evidence for an ongoing merger of two galaxies and their massive black holes when the Universe was only 740 million years old. This marks the most distant detection of a black hole merger ever obtained and the first time that this phenomenon has been detected so early in the Universe.

This image shows the galaxy EGSY8p7, a bright galaxy in the early Universe where light emission is seen from, among other things, excited hydrogen atoms – Lyman-α emission.

Galaxy mergers solve early Universe mystery

18 January 2024

A team of astronomers, led by the University of Cambridge, has used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to reveal, for the first time, what lies in the local environment of galaxies in the very early Universe.

Latest Gaia data release reveals rare lenses, cluster cores and unforeseen science

10 October 2023

The European Space Agency’s Gaia mission has released a goldmine of knowledge about our galaxy and beyond. Among other findings, the star surveyor has surpassed its planned potential to reveal half a million new and faint stars in a massive cluster, identified over 380 possible cosmic lenses, and pinpointed the positions of more than 150,000 asteroids within the Solar System.