ESA News

August 20, 2025

Top Headlines

A Record-breaking Antenna Just Deployed in Space. Here’s What It Will See

Aug. 18, 2025 — NASA and ISRO s NISAR satellite has just reached a major milestone: the successful deployment of its enormous 39-foot antenna reflector in orbit. Folded up like an umbrella during launch, the reflector is now fully extended and ready to support ...

NASA’s PREFIRE Satellites Reveal a Secret Glow Escaping from Our Planet

Aug. 18, 2025 — With its two tiny CubeSats, NASA’s PREFIRE mission is capturing invisible heat escaping from Earth, offering clues to how ice, clouds, and storms influence the climate system. The insights could lead to better weather forecasts and a deeper ...

UF Students Are Bending Metal with Lasers to Build Massive Structures in Orbit

July 2, 2025 — UF engineers, backed by DARPA and NASA, are perfecting laser-forming techniques that let metal sheets fold themselves into giant solar arrays, antennas, and even space-station parts right in ...

World’s Largest Camera Just Snapped the Universe in 3,200 Megapixels

June 27, 2025 — The LSST camera at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory has released its jaw-dropping first images, each capturing 45 times the area of the full moon in one shot. Over the next ten years, this cosmic giant will scan the southern sky in ultra-HD, helping ...

Particles Energized by Magnetic Reconnection in the Nascent Solar Wind

June 3, 2025 — Scientists have identified a new source of energetic particles near the Sun. These definitive observations were made by instruments aboard NASA's Parker Solar Probe, which detected the powerful phenomena as the spacecraft dipped in and out of the ...

Webb Reveals the Surprising Origin of Ultra-hot Exoplanet WASP-121b

June 2, 2025 — WASP-121b may have been born in a frozen zone and later migrated into its current inferno-like orbit. A surprise discovery of methane in the wrong place suggests intense vertical winds are reshaping how we understand planetary ...

Scientists Discover New Evidence of Intermediate-mass Black Holes

May 30, 2025 — A series of studies sheds light on the origins and characteristics of intermediate-mass black ...

Could 'Pausing' Cell Death Be the Final Frontier in Medicine on Earth and Beyond?

May 30, 2025 — The process of necrosis, a form of cell death, may represent one of the most promising ways to change the course of human aging, disease and even space travel, according to a new ...

'Raindrops in the Sun's Corona': New Adaptive Optics Shows Stunning Details of Our Star's Atmosphere

May 27, 2025 — Scientists have produced the finest images of the Sun's corona to date. To make these high-resolution images and movies, the team developed a new 'coronal adaptive optics' system that removes blur ...

Saturn's Moon: Mysterious Wobbling Atmosphere Like a Gyroscope

May 22, 2025 — The puzzling behavior of Titan's atmosphere has been revealed. The team has shown that the thick, hazy atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon doesn't spin in line with its surface, but instead wobbles like a gyroscope, shifting with the ...

Unveiling the Secrets of Planet Formation in Environments of High UV Radiation

May 21, 2025 — Even under intense ultraviolet radiation from giant stars, the raw ingredients for planets can endure. Using Webb s powerful infrared eyes, astronomers examined a young star in the Lobster Nebula and ...

Missing Link in Early Martian Water Cycle Discovered

May 20, 2025 — Astronomers have filled a large gap in knowledge about Mars' water cycle. Their research on water percolating from surface to aquifer could change the picture of what early Mars was like, suggesting that less of the planet's water may have been ...

Latest Headlines

updated 3:59am EDT

After 70 Years, the Sun’s Explosive Mystery Is Finally Solved

Aug. 20, 2025 — NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has directly observed magnetic reconnection in the Sun’s atmosphere for the first time, confirming decades-old theories about solar explosions. This discovery bridges ...

Astronomers Discover a Hidden Engine Inside Space’s “Eye of Sauron”

Aug. 19, 2025 — A mysterious blazar that baffled scientists for years has been unraveled. VLBA imaging revealed a toroidal magnetic field powering a jet aimed at Earth, explaining how it can unleash neutrinos and ...

Hubble Just Snapped the Clearest-Ever Picture of a Rare Interstellar Comet

Aug. 19, 2025 — Hubble has taken the clearest image to date of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, which is racing through our solar system at 130,000 miles per hour. Astronomers are using Hubble and other telescopes ...

Scientists May Have Finally Found the Universe’s Missing Sulfur

Aug. 19, 2025 — For decades, scientists have puzzled over why so little sulfur appears in space, even though it is one of the most common elements in the universe and vital to life. A new study suggests that the ...

Clearest Mars Images Yet Reveal Mystery Rock and Ancient Terrain in Stunning Detail

Aug. 15, 2025 — Captured at a location called “Falbreen,” this 360-degree view mosaic was stitched together 96 images that were acquired May 26, 2025. In the ...

Hubble Spots a Nearly Invisible Galaxy Hiding in Plain Sight

Aug. 15, 2025 — Hubble has captured the faint beauty of NGC 45, a spiral galaxy in Cetus whose glowing pink star-forming clouds reveal hidden activity. It belongs to the rare class of low surface brightness ...

The Disappearing Planet Next Door Has Astronomers Intrigued

Aug. 14, 2025 — NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has detected strong evidence for a giant planet orbiting Alpha Centauri A, the nearest Sun-like star to Earth. Located just 4 light-years away, this possible ...

Hubble Captures a Wild Star-Birthing Storm 160,000 Light-Years Away

Aug. 11, 2025 — Hubble’s latest portrait of the Tarantula Nebula reveals a turbulent star-making region far beyond the Milky Way. Located 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, this cosmic expanse ...

How NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer Was Lost Before Reaching the Moon

Aug. 11, 2025 — NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer, a mission designed to create high-resolution maps of water on the Moon, ended after losing contact with the spacecraft just one day after its February 26 launch. Despite ...

Giant Einstein Ring Reveals One of the Universe’s Biggest Black Holes

Aug. 10, 2025 — Astronomers have uncovered what may be the most massive black hole ever found, 36 billion times the mass of our Sun, hidden at the heart of the Cosmic Horseshoe galaxy. Located 5 billion light-years ...

This Star Survived Its Own Supernova and Shined Even Brighter

Aug. 4, 2025 — In a spectacular image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, the spiral galaxy NGC 1309 glows with cosmic elegance and hides a strange ...

Radar That Could Find Life on Europa Just Nailed Its First Big Test

Aug. 3, 2025 — NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft just aced a key radar test while flying past Mars, proving its ability to detect structures beneath planetary surfaces—something that couldn’t be tested on ...

Underground Life on Mars? Cosmic Rays Could Make It Possible

Aug. 3, 2025 — Cosmic rays from deep space might be the secret energy source that allows life to exist underground on Mars and icy moons like Enceladus and Europa. New research reveals that when these rays interact ...

Astronomers Detect Life’s Building Blocks Around a Young Star

Aug. 2, 2025 — Astronomers using ALMA have discovered complex organic molecules, including potential precursors to life's building blocks, in the protoplanetary disc of a young star, V883 Orionis. This finding ...

NASA and Japan’s XRISM Just Found Sulfur Hiding Between the Stars

Aug. 6, 2025 — An international team of scientists have provided an unprecedented tally of elemental sulfur spread between the stars using data from the Japan-led XRISM (X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission) ...

Hubble Caught a Star Exploding — and It’s Helping Map the Cosmos

July 25, 2025 — In the sprawling Hydra constellation, 137 million light-years away, lies NGC 3285B—a dazzling spiral galaxy recently spotlighted by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. This cosmic beauty orbits the ...

NASA’s Roman Telescope Will Catch 100,000 Explosions — and Rewrite the Universe’s Story

July 22, 2025 — NASA’s Roman Space Telescope is set to embark on a deep-sky survey that could capture nearly 100,000 cosmic explosions, shedding light on everything from dark energy to black hole physics. Its ...

Astronomers Just Witnessed Planets Being Born Around a Baby Star 1300 Light-Years Away

July 20, 2025 — Astronomers have, for the first time, observed the very beginning of planet formation around a star beyond our Solar System. Using the James Webb Space Telescope and ALMA, researchers detected hot ...

NASA’s IXPE Tracked a Rare Pulsar—and Found an Unexpected Power Source

July 20, 2025 — Astronomers studying a rare neutron star system have uncovered a surprising source of powerful X-rays. Using NASA s IXPE telescope and data from other observatories, an international team found that ...

Hubble Cracks Open a Glittering Cosmic Time Capsule, Revealing Multi-Generational Stars 160,000 Light-Years Away

July 14, 2025 — Hubble’s crystal-clear look at NGC 1786—an ancient globular cluster tucked inside the Large Magellanic Cloud—pulls us 160,000 light-years from Earth and straight into a cosmic time machine. ...

It Looked Like Nothing—then Scientists Found a World 10x the Size of Jupiter

July 14, 2025 — Astronomers have uncovered a massive, hidden exoplanet nestled in the dusty disc of a young star—MP Mus—by combining cutting-edge data from the ALMA observatory and ESA’s Gaia mission. ...

NASA Probe Flies Into the Sun and Captures the Origins of Solar Storms

July 11, 2025 — In its closest-ever dive into the Sun’s atmosphere, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has returned stunning new images and data that bring scientists closer to solving one of the Sun’s biggest ...

This Tiny Rice Plant Could Feed the First Lunar Colony

July 11, 2025 — In a bold step toward sustainable space travel, scientists are engineering a radically small, protein-rich rice that can grow in space. The Moon-Rice project, led by the Italian Space Agency in ...

Ice in a Million-Degree Fermi Bubble Reveals the Milky Way’s Recent Eruption

July 9, 2025 — Astronomers using the Green Bank Telescope spotted surprisingly cold, dense hydrogen clouds embedded inside the Milky Way’s vast, super-hot Fermi bubbles—structures thought to be created by a ...

Hidden DNA-Sized Crystals in Cosmic Ice Could Rewrite Water—and Life Itself

July 9, 2025 — Scientists from UCL and the University of Cambridge have revealed that "space ice"—long thought to be completely disordered—is actually sprinkled with tiny crystals, changing our ...

Massive Thread of Hot Gas Found Linking Galaxies — and It’s 10 Times the Mass of the Milky Way

June 19, 2025 — Astronomers have uncovered a colossal, searing-hot filament of gas linking four galaxy clusters in the Shapley Supercluster a discovery that could finally solve the mystery of the Universe s missing ...

A Thousand Colors, One Galaxy: Astronomers Reveal a Cosmic Masterpiece

June 18, 2025 — Astronomers have produced the most detailed map yet of the Sculptor Galaxy, revealing hundreds of previously unseen celestial features in stunning color and resolution. By combining over 50 hours of ...

Magnetic Mayhem at the Sun’s Poles: First Images Reveal a Fiery Mystery

June 16, 2025 — For the first time in history, we re seeing the Sun from an angle no one ever has: from above and below its poles. Thanks to the European Space Agency s Solar Orbiter and its tilted orbit, scientists ...

Webb Space Telescope Reveals Starburst Galaxies That Lit Up the Early Universe

June 13, 2025 — Data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has revealed dozens of small galaxies that played a starring role in a cosmic makeover that transformed the early universe into the one we know ...

Sun’s Secret Storms Exposed: NASA's Codex Unveils a Turbulent Corona

June 12, 2025 — NASA s CODEX experiment aboard the International Space Station is revealing the Sun like never before. Using advanced filters and a specialized coronagraph, CODEX has captured images showing that the ...