Keeping you posted on space science activities from the European Space Agency. Web: https://xitter.cf/t.co/urPDXGSEsQ Privacy Notice: https://xitter.cf/t.co/qxicLKTeFC
- Tweets15.9K
- Following409
- Followers418K
- Likes4.7K
ALT A nebula made of clouds of gas and dust with stars forming within. In the centre and out to the left it is filled with thin, wispy blue gas that forms delicate layers. Around this are thicker orange clouds with dark ridges. Thin red filaments of gas cross the centre of the nebula. Glowing bubbles in the gas contain dense, very bright clusters of stars. In the edges, distant stars are visible as bright points on a dark background.
ALT Infographic with facts and figures about ESA's largest Mars explorer, the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter.
ALT A young star cluster filled with many stars that display Webb’s unique eight-pronged diffraction pattern. At its center is a yellow star which sports the largest diffraction pattern. To the left of the star, there is a region filled with yellow dust and gas that extends from the star to the left border of the image. This yellow region extends from the bottom, covering about two-thirds of the image. The yellow region has several blue stars of different sizes embedded within. The top third, which lies outside of the yellow region, holds a few bright protostars, within dense gray gas. Those stars illuminate the gas, making it appear blue. A few red outflows from other protostars are visible above this grayish-blue region. To the right of the central star, there is a clumpy, flame-like plume of red dust and gas with protostars that emit a soft white light within. The plume is surrounded by more dense gray gas and dust. There are several background galaxies strewn throughout the image.
ALT A gaseous planet in the right foreground, seen mostly in silhouette, orbits a small, white star in the background at left. The star is surrounded by a thin, bright white disk tilted from lower left to upper right. A semi-transparent tail of material comes off the planet toward the upper right. Distant stars dot the black background of space.
ALT Artist’s concept of a star and its debris disc against the black background of space. The star is in the background, right of center, and depicted as a small, luminous sphere. The debris disc is a large blue ring that encircles the star. The debris disc is angled toward the viewer, so that the portion nearest to the viewer extends beyond the bottom frame of the illustration. Many dark, rocky fragments are scattered throughout the debris disc. In the foreground, toward the left, is a small planetary embryo colliding into the left side of a larger spherical object. The impact site glows bright yellow and orange and has a mottled appearance, as though chunks of both colliding bodies are breaking up and being destroyed. Orange-yellow streams of vapor extend outward from the collision area. Behind the debris disc and its star are many small stars in the background.
ALT A massive galaxy cluster, made of many golden elliptical galaxies with the largest, brightest one in the centre. Heavily distorted orange galaxies appear all around the cluster, the largest concentrated in a large arc around the cluster's centre; these are images of very distant galaxies, created by gravitational lensing. A few galaxies are large and bluish-white in colour; bright, nearby stars are the same colour.
ALT A spiral galaxy viewed at an angle, with a bright central bulge and winding spiral arms. The arms form a ring around the galaxy, without appearing to reach its centre. Prominent red-brown dust lanes weave through the arms, which are also dotted with bright blue and reddish regions of star formation. The galaxy is set against a dark background scattered with stars and faint distant galaxies.
ALT Side-by-side comparison of two views of the gas giant Saturn, labeled “August 29, 2025” at the top left corner. At left is a straight-on view of Saturn, a globe with pale yellow horizontal bands at the equator and orange and pink at the mid-latitudes. Some bands towards the north and south pole have a light blue hue. There are prominent horizontal rings circling at the equator. At right, labeled “Saturn’s south pole,” the south-polar view of Saturn shows concentric bands in its atmosphere, mostly tan and orange, surrounding a dark central region that has a 10-sided outline. A small, dashed circle at the very center of the pole with an “X” inside denotes missing data.
ALT The BepiColombo flight control team assembled in the Main Control Room at ESOC
ALT ESA’s Cluster Tango spacecraft re-enters Earth’s atmosphere against a dark blue sky, leaving multiple bright glowing streaks and fragments trailing behind it. The luminous trails extend diagonally across the image, illustrating the breakup of the object as it descends through the upper atmosphere.