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The pulsars in NICER’s sights
For the last few months, NASA has been running a new mission that promises to answer a question that
has been nagging us for decades: ‘How large is a neutron star?’. The instruments that researchers had
available before now only provided partial, approximate answers, but with the help of the NICER X-ray...
Exoplanet with glowing water atmosphere detected
Scientists have discovered the strongest evidence to date for a stratosphere on a planet outside our solar
system, or exoplanet. A stratosphere is a layer of atmosphere in which temperature increases with higher
altitudes. “This result is exciting because it shows that a common trait of most of the atmospheres in...
The PLATO mission, a decisive step
The Kepler space telescope brought us so close to discovering planets just like the Earth. Now the Euro-
pean Space Agency has started implementing an instrument that will harvest Kepler’s legacy and help
to provide a credible answer to the question most often asked by those who watch the night sky...
MASCARA sees first light at La Silla Observatory
In June 2016, ESO reached an agreement with Leiden University to site a station of MASCARA at ESO’s
La Silla Observatory in Chile, taking advantage of the excellent observing conditions of the southern
hemisphere skies. This station is now made its first successful test observations. The MASCARA station...
Hubble spots clumps of new stars in a distant galaxy
When it comes to the distant universe, even the keen vision of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope can only
go so far. Teasing out finer details requires clever thinking and a little help from a cosmic alignment with
a gravitational lens. By applying a new computational analysis to a galaxy magnified by a gravitational...
Preparing for Mercury: BepiColombo stack completes testing
ESA’s Mercury spacecraft has passed its final test in launch configuration, the last time it will be
stacked like this before being reassembled at the launch site next year. BepiColombo’s two orbiters,
Japan’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter and ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter, will be carried together...
Five years of Curiosity on Mars
Five years have passed since NASA's Curiosity rover landed near Mount Sharp on Mars. All along this
period, Curiosity has driven over 10 miles, taking over 200,000 images. In this symbolic tribute to the
mission, we introduce you some of the latest spectacular Martian landscapes created by merging...
ALMA confirms complex chemistry in Titan’s atmosphere
Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is one of our solar system’s most intriguing object and Earth-like bodies. It
is nearly as large as Mars and has a hazy atmosphere made up mostly of nitrogen with a smattering of
organic, carbon-based molecules, including methane (CH
4
) and ethane (C
2
H
6
). Planetary scientists...
The Adaptive Optics Facility sees first light
The Adaptive Optics Facility (AOF) is a long-term project on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to provide an
adaptive optics system for the instruments on Unit Telescope 4 (UT4), the first of which is MUSE (the Multi
Unit Spectroscopic Explorer). Adaptive optics works to compensate for the blurring effect of the Earth’s...
MUSE instrument discovers new way to fuel black holes
An Italian-led team of astronomers used the MUSE (Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer) instrument on the
Very Large Telescope (VLT) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile to study how gas can be stripped from
galaxies. They focused on extreme examples of jellyfish galaxies in near-by galaxy clusters, named after...