Category: Science

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Artist’s impression of Solar Orbiter making a flyby at Earth.

Solar Orbiter will make one gravity assist flyby of Earth and numerous flybys of Venus over the course of its mission to adjust its orbit, bringing it closer to the Sun and also out of the plane of the Solar System to observe the Sun from progressively higher inclinations. This will result in the spacecraft being able to take the first ever images of the Sun’s polar regions, crucial for understanding how the Sun ‘works’.

Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA. Its mission is to perform unprecedented close-up observations of the Sun and from high-latitudes, providing the first images of the uncharted polar regions of the Sun, and investigating the Sun-Earth connection. It is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, USA in February 2020.

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Artist’s impression of Solar Orbiter following launch and separation, with its solar arrays deployed. The instrument boom and antennas have not been deployed at this stage.

Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA. Its mission is to perform unprecedented close-up observations of the Sun and from high latitudes, providing the first images of the uncharted polar regions of the Sun, and investigating the Sun-Earth connection. It is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, USA in February 2020.

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Artist’s impression of the fairing encapsulating Solar Orbiter being released following launch on an Atlas V 411.

Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA. Its mission is to perform unprecedented close-up observations of the Sun and from high latitudes, providing the first images of the uncharted polar regions of the Sun, and investigating the Sun-Earth connection. It is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, USA in February 2020.

ESA’s new Sun explorer will be launched from Cape Canaveral on 6 February. Media are invited to Europe’s mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany, to follow the launch and moment of signal acquisition.

A 500-day global observation campaign spearheaded more than three years ago by ESA’s galaxy-mapping powerhouse Gaia has provided unprecedented insights into the binary system of stars that caused an unusual brightening of an even more distant star.

Observations from ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft are shedding light on the mysterious make-up of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, revealing a mix of compounds thought to be essential precursors to life – including salts of ammonium and a particular type of hydrocarbons.

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These illustrations show the surroundings of a black hole feeding on ambient gas as mapped using ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray observatory.

As the material falls into the black hole, it spirals around to form a flattened disc, as shown here, heating up as it does so. At the very centre of the disc, close to the black hole, a region of very hot electrons – with temperatures of around a billion degrees – known as the corona produced high-energy X-rays that stream out into space.

A new study has used the reverberating echoes of this radiation, as observed by XMM-Newton, to map the surroundings of a black hole. The study focussed on the black hole at the core of an active galaxy named IRAS 13224–3809, which is one of the most variable X-ray sources in the sky, undergoing very large and rapid fluctuations in brightness of a factor of 50 in mere hours.

By tracking the X-ray echoes, it was possible to track the dynamic behaviour of the corona itself, where the intense X-ray emission originates from. The corona is shown here as the bright region hovering over the black hole, changing in size and brightness. The study found that the corona of the black hole within IRAS 13224–3809 changed in size incredibly quickly, over a matter of days.

Full story: XMM-Newton maps black hole surroundings

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The changing activity of our Sun as seen by ESA’s Proba-2 satellite in 2019.

The satellite is continuously monitoring the Sun – one image was selected to represent each day of the year in this montage of 365 Suns. The images were taken by the satellite’s SWAP camera, which works at extreme ultraviolet wavelengths to capture the Sun’s hot turbulent atmosphere – the corona, at temperatures of about a million degrees.

Throughout 2019, the Sun showed low levels of activity, as it is currently at the minimum of its 11-year activity cycle. The most energetic flare of the year was observed on 6 May close to the eastern limb of the Sun (the left side of the Sun in the corresponding image). It was classified as a C9.9 class flare that divides solar flares according to their strength. The smallest are A, followed by B, C, M and X, with each letter representing a ten-fold increase in energy output such that an X-class flare is 100 times stronger than a C-class flare.

Proba-2 also performed various scientific campaigns in 2019. One of these campaigns is evident in the images above in early September, where the Sun is positioned to one side of the images. Throughout this period Proba-2 provided extended images of the solar atmosphere to the east of the Sun, in support of a scientific study performed with NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission. To make these observations the whole satellite was reoriented to observe more of the solar atmosphere.

Proba-2 will continue to support scientific campaigns and missions throughout 2020, including ESA’s Solar Orbiter mission, which is scheduled for launch on 5 February 2020 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, USA. Proba-2 has already supported Solar Orbiter during the mission’s preparation, as technology heritage has passed from the satellite’s SWAP imager to the Solar Orbiter Extreme Ultraviolet Imager.

With its suite of 10 state-of-the-art instruments, Solar Orbiter will perform unprecedented close-up observations of the Sun and from high-latitudes, providing the first images of the uncharted polar regions of the Sun, and investigating the Sun-Earth connection. The mission will provide unprecedented insight into how our parent star works in terms of the 11-year solar cycle, and how we can better predict periods of stormy space weather.

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This animated artist’s impression shows the Milky Way (the small galaxy depicted at the centre of the frame) and its halo (the extended gaseous region).

It illustrates the halo in three different shades – emerald, yellow and green. These all mix together throughout the halo, and each represents gas of a different temperature.

Dots then appear across this halo; these represent elements and their relative abundances, as detected by ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray space observatory: nitrogen (black, 41 dots), neon (orange/yellow, 39 dots), oxygen (light blue, 7 dots) and iron (red, 1 dot).

A halo is a vast region of gas, stars and invisible dark matter surrounding a galaxy. It is a key component of a galaxy, connecting it to wider intergalactic space, and is thus thought to play an important role in galactic evolution.

A study using XMM-Newton now shows that the Milky Way’s halo contains not one but three different components of hot gas, with the hottest of these being a factor of ten hotter than previously thought. This is the first time multiple gas components structured in this way have been discovered in not only the Milky Way, but in any galaxy.

The study also found that the halo has a different chemical makeup than predicted – it contains less iron than expected, indicating that the halo has been enriched by massive dying stars, and also less oxygen, likely due to this element being taken up by dusty particles in the halo.

Individual frames: Milky Way halo with elements; Milky Way halo without elements

Full story: XMM-Newton discovers scorching gas in Milky Way’s halo

ESA’s XMM-Newton has discovered that gas lurking within the Milky Way’s halo reaches far hotter temperatures than previously thought and has a different chemical make-up than predicted, challenging our understanding of our galactic home.

Fifteen years ago today, ESA’s Huygens probe made history when it descended to the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan and became the first probe to successfully land on another world in the outer Solar System. However, during its descent, the probe began spinning the wrong way – and recent tests now reveal why.

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ESA’s Characterising Exoplanet Satellite, Cheops, is shown here as a long streak against a backdrop of stars as it orbits the Earth after its successful launch on 18 December 2019.

The 6-minute long exposure was taken at 13:18 UTC on 11 January 2020 with the 1-m SAINT-EX robotic telescope, located at the National Astronomical Observatory of Mexico at San Pedro Martir, Mexico.

The coordinates of the centre of this 2048 x 2048 pixel image are: right ascension 11h 56m 58.00s and declination +27º 30’ 45.0’’ (J2000). The visible trail seen running from bottom to top in the image is due to sunlight reflected by the Cheops spacecraft, which is in a sun-synchronous orbit with an altitude of 700 km and a local time of the ascending node of 6:00am.

The image spans only 12 arcminutes across, so Cheops spent a very short time in the field of view – around 400 ms. The estimated V-band magnitude of Cheops in this image is 8.41.

Magnitude calculation by M. Sestovic, University of Bern.

More about Cheops

Note: This caption was edited on 15 January 2020 with an updated value of the estimated magnitude.

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This image shows part of the ice cap sitting at Mars’ north pole, complete with bright swathes of ice, dark troughs and depressions, and signs of strong winds and stormy activity.

The landscape here is a rippled mix of colour. Dark red and ochre-hued troughs appear to cut through the icy white of the polar cap; these form part of a wider system of depressions that spiral outwards from the very centre of the pole. Visible to the left of the frame are a few extended streams of clouds, aligned perpendicularly to a couple of the troughs. These are thought to be caused by small local storms that kick up dust into the martian atmosphere, eroding scarps and slopes as they do so and slowly changing the appearance of the troughs over time.

This image comprises data gathered on 16 November 2006 during orbit 3670. The ground resolution is approximately 15 m/pixel and the images are centred at about 244°E/85°N. This image was created using data from the nadir and colour channels of the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC). The nadir channel is aligned perpendicular to the surface of Mars, as if looking straight down at the surface. North is to the upper right.

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