Latest ESA Stories

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The European Space Agency's (ESA) Herschel space observatory has snapped images of a dust belt orbiting a subgiant star that hosts a planetary system. The space observatory's sensitive far-infrared detection helped astronomers resolve bright emission around Kappa Coronae Borealis, indicating the presence of a dusty debris disc. The star is a little heavier than our own Sun at 1.5 solar masses, is around 2.5 billion years old, and sits...

The Electronic Security Association (ESA) offers tips for utilizing three common smart home features. Irving, TX (PRWEB) April 08, 2013 It’s that time of year again: Flowers are blooming, the weather is warmer, and spending an afternoon outside is a pleasant prospect. In addition to more bearable temperatures, spring also motivates many homeowners to begin home improvement projects. This year, as part of your home upgrade, why not consider smart home technology? Integrating security...

ESA This week, ESA opened a new Space Weather Coordination Centre to gather up-to-date information on our Sun. It is the first such data coordination center opened under the Agency’s Space Situational Awareness Programme. The new Space Situational Awareness (SSA) Space Weather Coordination Centre (SSCC) will serve as the central access point to a portfolio of European space-weather expertise for customers, including satellite operators, industrial sectors including telecommunications...

ESA/Hubble The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has broken the record in the quest to find the furthest supernova of the type used to measure cosmic distances. This supernova exploded more than 10 billion years ago (redshift 1.914), at a time the Universe was in its early formative years and stars were being born at a rapid rate. The supernova, designated SN UDS10Wil, belongs to a special class of exploding stars known as Type Ia supernovae. These bright beacons are prized by astronomers...

ESA [ Watch The Video International Space Apps Challenge 2013 ] In April, you are invited to join thousands of enthusiasts to invent and create applications to help space exploration and improve life on Earth at the International Space Apps Challenge. During this app-jam, participants are challenged to use freely available data and rework them for new purposes or present them in new ways. Can you return the Mars Curiosity rover to Earth, visualize Solar flares that are invisible...

Watch the video "Black Hole Eats Super-Jupiter" Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers using the European Space Agency's (ESA) Integral space observatory have watched as a black hole woke up to feed on a low-mass object that strayed just a little too close. The team was using the Integral observatory to study a galaxy 47 million light-years away when they noticed a bright X-ray flare coming from another location. "The observation was completely unexpected,...

ESA Cosmologists using data from ESA's Planck satellite have compiled the first all-sky image of the distribution of dark matter across the entire history of the Universe as seen projected on the sky. This is made possible by analyzing the tiny distortions imprinted on the photons of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) by the gravitational lensing effect of massive cosmic structures. As photons traveled through these structures, which consist primarily of dark matter, their paths became...

ESA Like astronauts, heavy-equipment operators in remote mines can benefit from long-distance monitoring using space technology. An ESA spin-off company has raised safety for dozens of drivers at the El Brocal mine in Peru by predicting their fatigue. In far-flung mining operations around the world, drivers typically work 12-hour shifts, driving trucks and loaders of 160–180 tonnes – the size of a small apartment block. Combine the grueling schedule with even a small mistake, and...

ESA In this new view of a vast star-forming cloud called W3, ESA’s Herschel space observatory tells the story of how massive stars are born. W3 is a giant molecular cloud containing an enormous stellar nursery, some 6200 light-years away in the Perseus Arm, one of our Milky Way Galaxy’s main spiral arms. Spanning almost 200 light-years, W3 is one of the largest star-formation complexes in the outer Milky Way, hosting the formation of both low- and high-mass stars. The distinction...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Our planet has been mapped out and explored for the most part, but there are plenty of other planets out there waiting to be discovered, and the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express has provided the means to do so. Mars Express has spent the last ten years snapping images of the Red Planet, and a web interface featuring an archive of these images offers up the chance to explore any region on Mars through the eyes of the ESA...