Category: Science

Euclid shows us a spectacularly panoramic and detailed view of the Horsehead Nebula, also known as Barnard 33 and part of the constellation Orion.

This incredible snapshot from Euclid is a revolution for astronomy. The image shows 1000 galaxies belonging to the Perseus Cluster, and more than 100 000 additional galaxies further away in the background, each containing up to hundreds of billions of stars.

Over its lifetime, our dark Universe detective will image billions of galaxies, revealing the hidden influence that dark matter and dark energy have on them.

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No tricks, just treats

ESA’s Director of Science Carole Mundell and leading scientists from across Europe will gather at ESA’s Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, to discuss with Media the first, razor-sharp astronomical images of the Euclid mission, looking for mysterious, dark matter and energy.

Researchers using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) have discovered a high-speed jet stream sitting over Jupiter’s equator, above the main cloud decks.

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This is a transmission spectrum of the hot gas giant exoplanet WASP-17 b captured by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope’s innovative Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) on 12–13 March 2023. It reveals the first evidence for quartz (crystalline silica, SiO₂) in the clouds of an exoplanet.

This marks the first time that SiO₂ has been identified in an exoplanet, and the first time any specific cloud species has been identified in a transiting exoplanet.

The spectrum was made by measuring the change in brightness of 28 wavelength bands of mid-infrared light as the planet transited the star. Webb observed the WASP-17 system using MIRI’s low-resolution spectrograph for nearly 10 hours, collecting more than 1275 measurements before, during, and after the transit.

For each wavelength, the amount of light blocked by the planet’s atmosphere (white circles) was calculated by subtracting the amount that made it through the atmosphere from the amount originally emitted by the star.

The solid purple line is a best-fit model to the Webb (MIRI), Hubble, and Spitzer data (the Hubble and Spitzer data cover wavelengths from 0.34 to 4.5 microns and are not shown on the graph). The spectrum shows a clear feature around 8.6 microns, which astronomers think is caused by silica particles absorbing some of the starlight passing through the atmosphere.

The dashed yellow line shows what that part of the transmission spectrum would look like if the clouds in WASP-17 b’s atmosphere did not contain SiO₂.

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NGC 346 (MIRI image)

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HH 211 (NIRCam image)

Scientists have used Solar Orbiter’s EUI camera in a new mode of operation to record part of the Sun’s atmosphere at extreme ultraviolet wavelengths that has been almost impossible to image until now. This new mode of operation was made possible with a last-minute ‘hack’ to the camera and will almost certainly influence new solar instruments for future missions. 

ESA’s Mars Express has turned its trusty High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) towards Mars’s most imposing volcano, revealing its dramatic surroundings and turbulent past.

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This image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope shows a massive galaxy cluster called WHL0137-08, and at the right, an inset of the most strongly magnified galaxy known in the Universe’s first billion years: the Sunrise Arc. Within that galaxy is the most distant star ever detected, first discovered by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument reveals the star, nicknamed Earendel, to be a massive B-type star more than twice as hot as our Sun, and about a million times more luminous. Stars of this mass often have companions. Astronomers did not expect Webb to reveal any companions of Earendel since they would be so close together and indistinguishable on the sky. However, based solely on the colours of Earendel detected by Webb, astronomers think they see hints of a cooler companion star.

Webb’s NIRCam also shows other remarkable details in the Sunrise Arc. Features include both young star-forming regions and older established star clusters. On either side of the wrinkle of maximum magnification, which runs right through Earendel, these features are mirrored by the distortion of the gravitational lens. The region forming stars appears elongated, and is estimated to be less than 5 million years old. Smaller dots on either side of Earendel are two images of one older, more established star cluster, estimated to be 10 million years or older. Astronomers determined this star cluster is gravitationally bound and likely to persist until the present day. This shows us how the globular clusters in our own Milky Way might have looked when they formed 13 billion years ago.

[Image description: The image is split in half vertically to create two images. In the left image, a black background is scattered with hundreds of small galaxies of different shapes, ranging in colour from white to yellow to red. Some galaxies, mostly the redder galaxies, are distorted, appearing to be stretched out or mirror imaged. Just a little bit above the centre, there is a bright source of light, a star, with 8 bright diffraction spikes extending out from it. The right image is a zoomed-in portion of the image at the left, showing a particularly long, red, thin line that stretches from 1 o’clock to 7 o’clock. There are several bright dots, some thicker than others, along this line, with one labelled as Earendel.]

Ariel, ESA’s next-generation mission to observe the chemical makeup of distant exoplanets, has passed a major milestone after successfully completing its payload Preliminary Design Review (PDR).