ESA

ESA's Gaia mission has produced the richest star catalogue to date, including high-precision measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars and revealing previously unseen details of our home Galaxy.

This colourful cloud of glowing interstellar gas is just a tiny part of the Lagoon Nebula, a vast stellar nursery. This nebula is a region full of intense activity, with fierce winds from hot stars, swirling chimneys of gas, and energetic star formation all embedded within a hazy labyrinth of gas and dust. Hubble used both its optical and infrared instruments to study the nebula, which was observed to celebrate Hubble's 28th anniversary.

Media representatives are invited to a briefing on the second data release of ESA's Gaia mission, an astrometry mission to map more than one billion stars in our Galaxy, the Milky Way. The media briefing is being organised by ESA at the ILA Berlin Air and Space Show in Germany, on Wednesday 25 April 2018, 11:00–12:15 CEST. The show opens at 10:00 CEST.

Astronomers using ESA's XMM-Newton space observatory have probed the gas-filled haloes around galaxies in a quest to find 'missing' matter thought to reside there, but have come up empty-handed – so where is it?

The purpose of this Announcement of Opportunity (AO) is to solicit proposals for Community Scientists in the PLATO mission. This AO is open to scientists affiliated with institutes located in ESA Member States. Scientists involved in the PLATO Mission Consortium management (programmatic, scientific, or technical) or who are responsible for hardware or software development and procurement activities are not eligible to apply.

This 4th Announcement of Opportunity (AO), open to scientists affiliated with institutes located in ESA Member States, solicits proposals for participation as Science Planners in the NASA-led IRIS mission.

As astronomers worldwide are preparing to explore the second data release of ESA's Gaia satellite, the Data Processing and Analysing Consortium announced just how many sources will be included in the new catalogue, which will be made public on 25 April.

The purpose of this Announcement of Opportunity (AO) is to solicit proposals for membership of the X-ray Astronomy Recovery Mission (XARM) Science Team as Participating Scientists. This AO is open to scientists affiliated with institutes located in ESA Member States.

Last year, ESA called on the scientific community to propose new and innovative science ideas that could be relevant for future space missions within the Science Programme. From the proposals that were received three key areas of interest have been selected for further investigation.