Starry spiral in a familiar neighbourhood

A spiral galaxy seen close up and tilted at an angle, so that its disc fills the view from corner to corner. Its disc is yellow near to the centre and pale blue farther out, showing cooler and hotter stars, respectively. Thin brown clouds of dust, glowing pink spots of star formation, and sparkling blue patches filled with star clusters swirl through the galaxy. Behind it, small orange dots are very distant galaxies. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker and the PHANGS-HST Team Hi-res image (7.64 MB)
Licence: CC BY 4.0 INT or ESA Standard Licence (content can be used under either licence)

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In this new image by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, a spiral galaxy glittering with star clusters is the centre of attention. NGC 3137 is located 53 million light-years away in the constellation Antlia (The Air Pump). As a nearby spiral galaxy, this target offers astronomers an excellent opportunity to study the cycle of stellar birth and death, as well as giving researchers a glimpse of a galactic system similar to our own.

NGC 3137 is of particular interest to astronomers because it travels through space with a group of galaxies that is thought to be similar to the Local Group, the galaxy group that contains the Milky Way. Similar to the Local Group, the NGC 3175 group contains two large spiral galaxies: NGC 3137 and NGC 3175, which Hubble has also observed. In the Local Group, the largest members are the Milky Way galaxy and Andromeda, another spiral galaxy. In addition to two large spiral galaxies, both groups also contain a number of smaller dwarf galaxies, although it’s not yet known how many of these tiny companions the NGC 3175 group has; researchers have found more than 500 dwarf galaxy candidates. By studying this nearby galaxy group, astronomers can learn about the dynamics of our own galactic home.

NGC 3137 is revealed in fantastic detail by Hubble. This image is crafted from observations in six different colour bands, creating a view that highlights several facets of this beautiful spiral. The galaxy’s centre, which is encircled by a network of fine, dusty clouds, hosts a black hole estimated to be 60 million times more massive than the Sun. NGC 3137 is highly inclined from our point of view, giving a unique perspective on its loose, feathery spiral structure. A couple of photobombing Milky Way stars and a smattering of far more distant background galaxies complete the image.

As stunning as each of these features may be, it’s the galaxy’s brilliant star clusters that steal the show. The galaxy is peppered with dense clusters of bright blue stars and glowing red gas clouds, which signal the presence of hot, young stars still encased in their birth nebulae.

Unsurprisingly, these star clusters are exactly what has drawn Hubble’s keen eye. Researchers are using Hubble to carry out an observing programme (#17502; PI: D. Thilker) focusing on star clusters in 55 nearby galaxies. These observations give an in-depth view of stellar life in spiral galaxies, from the young stars still in the process of forming to the ancient stellar populations that grew up in the early years of their galactic hosts.

Source: ESA/Science Exploration

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Links

• Release on esahubble.org
• Pan video: NGC 3137

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Euclid Space Warps: help spot galaxies bending spacetime

Strong gravitational lenses captured by Euclid

A collage of fourteen by eight squares containing examples of gravitational lenses. Each example typically comprises a bright centre with smears of stacredirs in an arc or multiple arcs around it as a result of light travelling towards Euclid from distant galaxies being bent and distorted by normal and dark matter in the foreground. In some rare cases the smearing is in a complete ring, crea,brting a so-called Einstein Ring. Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by M. Walmsley, M. Huertas-Company, J.-C. Cuillandre.Hi-res JPG

Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO or ESA Standard Licence (content can be used under either licence)

Infographic explaining how an Einstein Ring is formed

Against a dark blue background, this infographic contains a paragraph of text in the top left corner, the logo of ESA in the top right corner and a succession of graphics in the bottom half of the image. The text paragraph explains the principle behind Einstein rings, and it can be read in the image caption. The graphics below it illustrate this astrophysical phenomenon, and by looking at them from left to right we can understand the process of how Einstein rings are formed.

The left-most element in the bottom half of the image is a graphic representation of a galaxy, labelled ‘distant galaxy’. To the right of it, another galaxy is shown, labelled ‘Foreground galaxy acting as a magnifying lens’. The third illustration, to the right of the previous one, shows ESA’s Euclid space telescope and is labelled ‘Telescope’. The ‘distant galaxy’ and the ‘Telescope’ are connected by two lines that form an elongated diamond-shape around the ‘Foreground galaxy’. This line is labelled ‘Gravity bends the light rays of the distant galaxy’. The fourth and last illustration in the line shows a ring of light around a central disk and is labelled ‘What the telescope sees’. Credit: ESA. Hi-res JPG

Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO or ESA Standard Licence (content can be used under either licence)

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In brief

With the launch of Space Warps, a new citizen science project on the Zooniverse platform, you can now join in the search to find rare and elusive strong gravitational lenses in never-before-seen images captured by the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope. The project aims at shining a light on dark matter in galaxies and providing clues about mysterious dark energy.

In-depth

Warps in spacetime do not only show up in science fiction movies like Interstellar. In real life, we can see the warping effect that gravity has on spacetime in the form of gravitational lensing.

The enormous gravity of a massive object – such as a galaxy or cluster of galaxies – distorts the shape of spacetime and can bend the light rays coming from a distant galaxy behind. By warping spacetime, the foreground galaxy acts like a magnifying glass.

Light from the background object that would be obscured doesn’t travel in a straight line anymore. Instead, it curves around the intervening mass, often producing multiple images, stretched arcs, or even a complete ring known as ‘Einstein ring’, like the one recently discovered by Euclid.

Strong gravitational lenses offer a striking demonstration of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, showing that matter in the Universe can act as a natural telescope, bringing distant objects into sight.

ESA’s Euclid telescope is revolutionising the studies of strong gravitational lensing by providing very sensitive imaging over large swaths of the sky in unprecedented detail. This is exactly what is needed to identify rare gravitational lenses.

In March 2025, 500 galaxy-galaxy strong lenses were found nestled in just the first 0.04% of Euclid data, most of them previously unknown. This pioneering catalogue was created thanks to the combined effort from citizen scientists, artificial intelligence (AI) and researchers.

Early glimpse of new Euclid images

As Euclid continues its survey, sending around 100 GB of data back to Earth every day, ESA and the Euclid Consortium once again need help from citizen scientists to identify strong gravitational lenses in a large data set.

For this, the Space Warps team has launched a citizen science project based on new Euclid images, which will be part of the future Euclid Data Release 1. While this data is not public yet, by participating in this new citizen science project you can get an early glimpse of these new images of galaxies captured by the telescope.

For this project, you will be inspecting new high quality imaging data from Euclid in which many previously unknown strong lenses are hiding. About 300 000 images pre-selected by AI algorithms will be shown, which are fine-tuned with the results from the initial citizen-science Euclid strong lens search. These are the highest ranked candidates from a whopping 72 million galaxies from DR1 that were classified by the AI algorithms. Scientists expect that this exquisite high-quality data will reveal more than 10 000 new lenses.

What can we learn from strong lenses.

The Euclid mission explores how the Universe has expanded and how its structure has changed through cosmic history using mainly two methods: weak lensing and baryonic acoustic oscillations. From this, scientists can learn more about the role of gravity and the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

Strong gravitational lenses can also provide insights into these central questions. For example, strong lensing features can ‘weigh’ individual galaxies and clusters of galaxies. This reveals the total matter (whether dark or light) and traces the distribution of dark matter. By studying strong lenses across cosmic time, scientists can trace the expansion of the Universe and its apparent acceleration. This will provide additional insight into the role of dark energy..

“We’ve already seen the success of combining AI with visual inspection by citizen volunteers and scientists on Space Warps, efficiently finding hundreds of high‑probability lens candidates in an initial small Euclid search in 2024”, explains Aprajita Verma, Space Warps’ co-founder and project lead at the University of Oxford, UK..

“In this brand new DR1 data, 30 times larger than the initial search and together with our improved AI algorithms, we are expecting to find more than 10 000 high quality lens candidates. This is more than four times the number of lenses than we have been able to find since the first gravitational lens was discovered nearly 50 years ago.”.

This step-change is possible thanks to Euclid. The mission can map large areas of the sky with unique sharpness, an ideal combination for finding rare objects like strong gravitational lenses..

“We can’t wait to see what we will find within this unprecedented dataset. Join us on Space Warps to take part in this exciting search!” concludes Aprajita.

Euclid: ESA’s mission into the unknown
Access the video

Source: ESA/Science Exploration

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About Euclid

Euclid was launched in July 2023 and started its routine science observations on 14 February 2024. The goal of the mission is to reveal the hidden influence of dark matter and dark energy on the visible Universe. Over a period of six years, Euclid will observe the shapes, distances and motions of billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years. Euclid is a European mission, built and operated by ESA, with contributions from NASA. The Euclid Consortium – consisting of more than 2000 scientist from 300 institutes in 15 European countries, the USA, Canada, and Japan – is responsible for providing the scientific instruments and scientific data analysis. ESA selected Thales Alenia Space as prime contractor for the construction of the satellite and its service module, with Airbus Defence and Space chosen to develop the payload module, including the telescope. NASA provided the detectors of the Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer, NISP. Euclid is a medium-class mission in ESA’s Cosmic Vision Programme.

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A pair of planet-forming discs

Image Description: Two images of protoplanetary discs side-by-side. The left image shows a dark horizontal band covering the star, with broad, colourful, conical outflows above and below it, and a narrow jet pointing directly up and down from the star. The right image shows the star within a yellow dusty disc, with scattered dust creating purple lobes above and below the disc. Each is on a black background with several galaxies or stars around it. Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, ESA/Hubble, ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), G. Duchêne, M. Villenave Hi-res Tif

This month’s NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month offers us a two-for-one on brand new stars – with some potential planets thrown in as well!

This visual highlights Webb's views of the protoplanetary discs Tau 042021 (left) and Oph 163131 (right), otherwise known by the catalogue numbers 2MASS J04202144+2813491 and 2MASS J16313124-2426281, respectively. Tau 042021 is situated around 450 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus, while Oph 163131 lies about 480 light-years away in Ophiuchus.

Protoplanetary discs like these appear around stars that have recently been born. When a clump of gas inside a larger molecular cloud collapses to form a star, unused gas and dust is left orbiting the star in a thick disc. Over time, this dust too collides and collapses, slowly forming planetesimals which can, in turn, develop into planets. The planetesimals which can’t make the jump to being a fully-fledged planet are left behind as asteroids and comets orbiting the star. Gas that isn’t consumed by this process is blown away by the new star’s radiation over the course of tens of millions of years, ending the protoplanetary disc. This is how our own Solar System formed in the distant past, creating the asteroids, comets, gas giants and terrestrial planets we know today. By observing other protoplanetary discs at a much earlier age, we can work out how this process worked for our own Solar System, and how the different kinds of planets we see across the galaxy could have formed.

The unique feature these two objects have in common is that, as we see them from our vantage point with Webb, they are oriented with the edge of the disc facing us. This means that the bright light from the young star in the centre is mostly blocked, and we see the fine dust that has risen out of the disc as a nebula above and below the disc, lit by reflected light from the star. Not only is this a beautiful sight, producing these images that resemble rainbow-coloured spinning tops in space, it’s essential for studying how these planet-forming discs are composed. The distribution of dust in the disc, both within it and above or below it, strongly affects where and how planets can form.

These images were created using data from Webb’s NIRCam and MIRI instruments, as part of Webb programme #2562 (PI F. Ménard, K. Stapelfeldt). With the broad infrared sensitivity of these two cameras, Webb can track dust grains of different sizes across the disc. The red, orange and green colours of the discs in these images indicate various sizes of dust grains as well as molecules such as hydrogen (H2), carbon monoxide (CO) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).

Both images also feature data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, which shows visible light, mainly from the central star reflected off the fine, floating dust. The image of Oph 163131 also includes observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Where Hubble and Webb each image tiny dust grains only micrometres across, ALMA sees larger dust grains that are about a milimetre in size, which are concentrated in the central plane of the disc. This can create the right conditions for the grains to continue to grow and potentially form planets. Indeed, the ALMA data for Oph 163131 shows a gap in the inner disc, which may already be evidence of a planet forming and clearing out the dust around it.

Source: ESA/Science Exploration

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Links

• Release on esawebb.org
• Wide view of Oph 163131
• Annotated close-up of Oph 163131
• Image of Tau 042021
• Science paper (G. Duchêne et al.)
• Science paper (M. Villenave et al.)
• Science paper (M. Villenave et al.)

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Licence:

CC BY 4.0 INT or ESA Standard Licence (content can be used under either licence)

• Space Science
• Hubble Space Telescope
• JWST
• Webb
• Extra solar planet

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Cheops discovers late bloomer from another era

The four planets of LHS 1903
Artist impression of the planetary system around the star LHS 1903
Credit: ESA | Acknowledgements: ATG Europe
Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO or ESA Standard Licence (content can be used under either licence)

In brief

Scientists used the European Space Agency's Cheops satellite to discover that the planetary system around the star LHS 1903 challenges current planet formation theories with the unusual order of its planets. Surprisingly, the most distant outer planet might be rocky and seems to have formed later – in a different environment than the other planets around the star.

In-depth

Many Vile Earthlings Munch Jam Sandwiches Under Newspapers and My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nachos. What sounds like gibberish half-sentences are memory aids taught to children to help remember the order of the planets in our Solar System: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

The eight familiar planets can be sorted into two different types: rocky and gaseous. The inner planets that are closest to the Sun – Mercury to Mars – are rocky, and the outer planets – Jupiter to Neptune – are gaseous.

This general pattern, that planetary systems form with rocky planets closer to their star, followed by gaseous planets as the outer bodies, has been commonly observed across the Universe. It is what our current planet formation theories predict and what observations have widely confirmed to be true.

That was until scientists took a closer look at the planetary system around a star called LHS 1903 with ESA’s CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite (Cheops). What they have just discovered might flip our understanding of how planets form upside down.

LHS 1903 is a small red M-dwarf star that is cooler and shines less brightly than our Sun. Thomas Wilson from the University of Warwick in the UK and his international team combined the efforts of various telescopes in space and on Earth to classify three planets that they had spotted orbiting LHS 1903. They were able to conclude that the innermost planet seemed to be rocky, and the two that followed it gaseous.

So far, so normal. It wasn’t until Thomas and his colleagues were analysing observations made by ESA’s Cheops, that they discovered something strange: the data showed a small fourth planet, furthest from LHS 1903. And upon closer inspection, the scientists were surprised to discover that this planet seems to be rocky!

“That makes this an inside-out system, with a planet order of rocky-gaseous-gaseous-and then rocky again. Rocky planets don’t usually form so far away from their home star,” says Thomas.

Cheops open questions: How do planets form?
Credit: ESA
Licence: ESA Standard Licence

Current planet formation theories predict that the inner planets in a system are small and rocky, because close to the star the radiation is so powerful that it sweeps away most of the gas around the planets’ rocky core. Further away from the star, in the outer part of a planetary system, the conditions are cool enough for a thick atmosphere to gather into a gaseous planet.

ESA’s Cheops project scientist Maximilian Günther is enthusiastic: “Much about how planets form and evolve is still a mystery. Finding clues like this one for solving this puzzle is precisely what Cheops set out to do.”

Cheops open questions: How do planets evolve?

Credit: ESA 

Born to be weird?

Scientists are not quick to say that an established theory needs to be reconsidered, based on a single contradictory observation. So, Thomas and his colleagues set out to explore various explanations for why this strange rocky planet breaks the familiar pattern.

Was the planet, for example, at some point in its past hit by a giant asteroid, comet, or another big object, that blew away its atmosphere? Or had the planets around LHS 1903 swapped places at some point during their evolution? After testing these scenarios through simulations and calculations of the planets’ orbital times, the team of scientists ruled them out.

Instead, their investigation led them to a more intriguing explanation: the planets may have formed one after the other, instead of at the same time. According to our current understanding, planets form from discs of gas and dust (protoplanetary discs) by clumping into planetary embryos at roughly the same time. These clumps then evolve into planets of different sizes and compositions over millions of years.

In contrast, here Thomas and his team discovered a planetary system where the star might have given birth to its four planets one after the other, instead of bearing quadruplets at once. This idea – known as inside-out planet formation – was proposed by scientists as a theory about a decade ago, but until now, never has the evidence been so strong.

A late bloomer defying expectations

This conclusion comes with an additional catch: Much like how our younger siblings are growing up in a world that is different from the one of our childhoods, this small rocky planet seems to have evolved and formed in a very different environment than its older sibling-planets.

“By the time this outer planet formed, the system may have already run out of gas, which is considered vital for planet formation. Yet here is a small, rocky world, defying expectations. It seems that we have found first evidence for a planet which formed in what we call a gas-depleted environment”, says Thomas.

The small rocky world is either an odd outlier, or the first evidence for a trend we hadn’t known about yet. Either way, its discovery begs for an explanation that lies beyond our usual planet formation theories.

Our Solar System as a one-size-fits-all

“Historically, our planet formation theories are based on what we see and know about our Solar System,” Isabel Rebollido who is currently a Research Fellow at ESA points out. “As we are seeing more and more different exoplanet systems, we are starting to revisit these theories.”

As our instruments improve, we continue to discover more and more ‘weird’ planetary systems in the vastness of space. They force us to question our understanding and make us reconsider established theories of planet formation. Ultimately, these discoveries are helping us learn about how our Solar System fits into the big family of diverse planetary systems. They make us wonder how special the order of the planets is that we teach our children, and if maybe it is our home Solar System that is the weird one after all.

Source: ESA/Science Exploration

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Notes for editors

'Gas-depleted planet formation occurred in the four-planet system around the red dwarf LHS 1903' by T. Wilson et al. is published in Science on 12 February 2026. DOI:10.1126/science.adl2348

For more information, please contact:

ESA Media relations
media@esa.int

More about Cheops

Cheops is an ESA mission developed in partnership with Switzerland, with a dedicated consortium led by the University of Bern, and with important contributions from Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the UK.

ESA is the Cheops mission architect, responsible for procurement and testing of the satellite, the launch and early operations phase, and in-orbit commissioning, as well as the Guest Observers’ Programme through which scientists world-wide can apply to observe with Cheops. The consortium of 11 ESA Member States led by Switzerland provided essential elements of the mission. The prime contractor for the design and construction of the spacecraft is Airbus Defence and Space in Madrid, Spain.

The Cheops mission consortium runs the Mission Operations Centre located at INTA, in Torrejón de Ardoz near Madrid, Spain, and the Science Operations Centre, located at the University of Geneva, Switzerland.

For more information, visit: https://www.esa.int/Cheops

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Flaring black hole whips up ultra-fast winds

Artist’s impression of the flaring, windy black hole in NGC 3783 (portrait)
Credit: ESA - Acknowledgements: ATG Europe
Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO or ESA Standard Licence
(content can be used under either licence)

An artist's impression of XMM-Newton.
Credit: ESA-C. Carreau
Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO or ESA Standard Licence
(content can be used under either licence)

XRISM spacecraft
Credit: JAXA
ESA Standard Licence

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Leading X-ray space telescopes XMM-Newton and XRISM have spotted an extraordinary blast from a supermassive black hole. In a matter of hours, the gravitational monster whipped up powerful winds, flinging material out into space at eye-watering speeds of 60 000 km per second.

The gigantic black hole lurks within NGC 3783, a beautiful spiral galaxy imaged recently by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Astrono.mers spotted a bright X-ray flare erupt from the black hole before swiftly fading away. As i,brt faded, fast winds emerged, raging at one-fifth of the speed of light.

“We’ve not watched a black hole create winds this speedily before,” says lead researcher Liyi Gu at Space Research Organisation Netherlands (SRON). “For the first time, we’ve seen how a rapid burst of X-ray light from a black hole immediately triggers ultra-fast winds, with these winds forming in just a single day.”

Devouring material

To study NGC 3783 and its black hole, Gu and colleagues simultaneously used the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton and the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM), a JAXA-led mission with ESA and NASA participation.

The black hole in question is as massive as 30 million Suns. As it feasts on nearby material, it powers an extremely bright and active region at the heart of the spiral galaxy. This region, known as an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN), blazes in all kinds of light, and throws powerful jets and winds out into the cosmos.

“AGNs are really fascinating and intense regions, and key targets for both XMM-Newton and XRISM,” adds Matteo Guainazzi, ESA XRISM Project Scientist and co-author of the discovery.

“The winds around this black hole seem to have been created as the AGN’s tangled magnetic field suddenly ‘untwisted’ – similar to the flares that erupt from the Sun, but on a scale almost too big to imagine.”

A little less alien

The winds from the black hole resemble large solar eruptions of material known as coronal mass ejections, which form as the Sun hurls streams of superheated material into space. In this way, the study shows that supermassive black holes sometimes act like our own star, making these mysterious objects seem a little less alien.

In fact, a coronal mass ejection following an intense flare was spotted at the Sun as recently as 11 November, with the winds associated with this event thrown out at initial speeds of 1500 km per second.

“Windy AGNs also play a big role in how their host galaxies evolve over time, and how they form new stars,” adds Camille Diez, a team member and ESA Research Fellow.

“Because they’re so influential, knowing more about the magnetism of AGNs, and how they whip up winds such as these, is key to understanding the history of galaxies throughout the Universe.”

A joint discovery

XMM-Newton has been a pioneering explorer of the hot and extreme Universe for over 25 years, while XRISM has been working to answer key open questions about how matter and energy move through the cosmos since it launched in September 2023.

The two X-ray space telescopes worked together to uncover this unique event and understand the black hole’s flare and winds. XMM-Newton tracked the evolution of the initial flare with its Optical Monitor, and assessed the extent of the winds using its European Photon Imaging Camera (EPIC). XRISM spotted the flare and winds using its Resolve instrument, also studying the winds’ speed, structure, and figuring out how they were launched into space.

“Their discovery stems from successful collaboration, something that’s a core part of all ESA missions,” says ESA XMM-Newton Project Scientist Erik Kuulkers.

“By zeroing in on an active supermassive black hole, the two telescopes have found something we’ve not seen before: rapid, ultra-fast, flare-triggered winds reminiscent of those that form at the Sun. Excitingly, this suggests that solar and high-energy physics may work in surprisingly familiar ways throughout the Universe.”

Source: ESA/Science Exploration

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Notes for editors

‘Delving into the depths of NGC 3783 with XRISM: III. Birth of an ultrafast outflow during a soft flare’ by Liyi Gu et al. is published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

SRON news release

For more information, please contact:
ESA Media Relations
media@esa.int

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First confirmed sighting of explosive burst on nearby star

Artist's impression of an explosion on another star
Credit: Olena Shmahalo/Callingham et al.

A coronal mass ejection coming from the Sun on 27 May 2024
Credit: SOHO (ESA & NASA), NASA/SDO/AIA, JHelioviewer/D. Müller

XMM-Newton
Credit: ESA-C. Carreau

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Astronomers using the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton space observatory and the LOFAR telescope have definitively spotted an explosive burst of material thrown out into space by another star – a burst powerful enough to strip away the atmosphere of any unlucky planet in its path.

The burst was a coronal mass ejection (CME), eruptions we often see coming from the Sun. During a CME, massive amounts of material are flung out from our star, flooding the surrounding space. These dramatic expulsions shape and drive space weather, such as the dazzling auroras we see on Earth, and can chip away at the atmospheres of any nearby planets.

But while CMEs are commonplace at the Sun, we hadn’t convincingly spotted one on another star – until now.

“Astronomers have wanted to spot a CME on another star for decades,” says Joe Callingham of the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON), author of the new research published in Nature. “Previous findings have inferred that they exist, or hinted at their presence, but haven’t actually confirmed that material has definitively escaped out into space. We’ve now managed to do this for the first time.”

As a CME travels through the layers of a star out into interplanetary space, it produces a shock wave and associated burst of radio waves (a type of light). This short, intense radio signal was picked up by Joe and colleagues and found to come from a star lying around 130 light-years away.

“This kind of radio signal just wouldn’t exist unless material had completely left the star’s bubble of powerful magnetism,” adds Joe. “In other words: it’s caused by a CME.”

A danger to any planets

The matter-flinging star is a red dwarf – a type of star far fainter, cooler, and smaller than the Sun. It is nothing like our own star: it has roughly half the mass, it rotates 20 times faster, and has a magnetic field 300 times more powerful. Most of the planets known to exist in the Milky Way orbit this kind of star.

The radio signal was spotted using the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope thanks to new data processing methods developed by co-authors Cyril Tasse and Philippe Zarka at the Observatoire de Paris-PSL. The team then used ESA’s XMM-Newton to determine the star’s temperature, rotation, and brightness in X-ray light. This was essential to interpret the radio signal and figure out what was actually going on.

We needed the sensitivity and frequency of LOFAR to detect the radio waves,” says co-author David Konijn, a PhD student working with Joe at ASTRON. “And without XMM-Newton, we wouldn’t have been able to determine the CME’s motion or put it in a solar context, both crucial for proving what we’d found. Neither telescope alone would have been enough – we needed both.”

The researchers determined the CME to be moving at a super-fast 2400 km per second, a speed only seen in 1 of every 2000 CMEs taking place on the Sun. The ejection was both fast and dense enough to completely strip away the atmospheres of any planets closely orbiting the star.

In search of life

The atmosphere-stripping ability of the CME is an exciting discovery for our hunt for life around other stars. A planet’s habitability for life as we know it is defined by its distance from its parent star – whether or not it sits within the star’s ‘habitable zone’, a region where liquid water can exist on the surface of planets with suitable atmospheres. This is a Goldilocks scenario: too close to the star is too hot, too far is too cold, and in between is just right.

But what if that star is especially active, regularly throwing out dangerous eruptions of material and triggering violent storms? A planet regularly bombarded by powerful coronal mass ejections may lose its atmosphere entirely, leaving a barren rock behind – an uninhabitable world, despite its orbit being ‘just right’.

“This work opens up a new observational frontier for studying and understanding eruptions and space weather around other stars,” adds Henrik Eklund, an ESA research fellow based at the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in Noordwijk, The Netherlands.uninhabitable world, despite its orbit being ‘just right’.
 

“We’re no longer limited to extrapolating our understanding of the Sun's CMEs to other stars. It seems that intense space weather may be even more extreme around smaller stars – the primary hosts of potentially habitable exoplanets. This has important implications for how these planets keep hold of their atmospheres and possibly remain habitable over time.”

The finding also informs our understanding of space weather, something that’s long been a focus for ESA missions and is currently being explored by SOHO, the Proba missions, Swarm, and Solar Orbiter.uninhabitable world, despite its orbit being ‘just right’.

XMM-Newton, meanwhile, is a leading explorer of the hot and extreme Universe. Launched in 1999, the space telescope has gazed into the cores of galaxies, studied stars to understand how they evolve, investigated the environs of black holes, and spotted intense bursts of energetic radiation from distant stars and galaxies.

“XMM-Newton is now helping us discover how CMEs vary by star, something that’s not only interesting in our study of stars and our Sun, but also our hunt for habitable worlds around other stars,” says ESA XMM-Newton Project Scientist Erik Kuulkers. “It also demonstrates the immense power of collaboration, which underpins all successful science. The discovery was a true team effort, and resolves the decades-long search for CMEs beyond the Sun.”

Notes for editors

The paper, “Radio Burst from a Stellar Coronal Mass Ejection” by Callingham et al., is published in Nature on 12 November. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09715-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09715-3

XMM-Newton is part of the portfolio of science missions in ESA’s Science Programme, which includes several missions dedicated to the detection and characterisation of exoplanets. ESA’s next generation X-ray mission – NewAthena – is poised to transform X-ray astronomy with pioneering European-developed optics, paving the way for groundbreaking discoveries for decades to come.

For more information, please contact:

ESA Media Relations, media@esa.int

Source: ESA/Science & Exploration

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From boring to bursting: a giant black hole awakens

Giant black hole awakens with recurring X-ray bursts

A bright disc of purplish, white and gold lines surrounds a black ellipse-shaped area, that looks like a hole in space. A ball of shining material pierces through the disc; an eruption of bright white-to-gold rays encircles the small hole in the disc provoked by the passage of the shining ball. Credit: ESA Acknowlegenebts: ATG Europe

Licence:CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO or ESA Standard Licence (content can be used under either licence)

The European Space Agency's XMM-Newton is playing a crucial role in investigating the longest and most energetic bursts of X-rays seen from a newly awakened black hole. Watching this strange behaviour unfold in real time offers a unique opportunity to learn more about these powerful events and the mysterious behaviour of massive black holes.

Although we know that supermassive black holes (millions of times the mass of our Sun) lurk at the centre of most galaxies, their very nature makes them difficult to spot and study. In contrast to the popular idea of black holes constantly ‘gobbling up’ matter, these gravitational monsters can spend long periods of time in a dormant, inactive phase.

This was true of the black hole at the heart of SDSS1335+0728, a distant and unremarkable galaxy 300 million light-years away in the constellation of Virgo. After being inactive for decades, it suddenly lit up and recently began producing unprecedented flashes of X-ray light.

The first signs of activity appeared in late 2019, when the galaxy unexpectedly began shining brightly, attracting the attention of astronomers. After studying it for several years, they concluded that the unusual changes they saw were probably the result of the black hole suddenly ‘switching on’ – entering an active phase. The bright, compact, central region of the galaxy is now classified as an active galactic nucleus, nicknamed ‘Ansky’.

“When we first saw Ansky light up in optical images, we triggered follow-up observations using NASA’s Swift X-ray space telescope, and we checked archived data from the eROSITA X-ray telescope, but at the time we didn’t see any evidence of X-ray emissions,” says Paula Sánchez Sáez, a researcher at the European Southern Observatory, Germany, and leader of the team that first explored the black hole’s activation.

XMM-Newton
Credit: ESA-C. Carreau

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Ansky wakes up

Then, in February 2024, a team led by Lorena Hernández-García, a researcher at the Valparaiso University, Chile, began to see bursts of X-rays from Ansky at nearly regular intervals.

“This rare event provides an opportunity for astronomers to observe a black hole’s behaviour in real time, using X-ray space telescopes XMM-Newton and NASA’s NICER, Chandra and Swift. This phenomenon is known as a quasiperiodic eruption, or QPE. QPEs are short-lived flaring events. And this is the first time we have observed such an event in a black hole that seems to be waking up,” explains Lorena.

“The first QPE episode was discovered in 2019, and since then we’ve only detected a handful more. We don’t yet understand what causes them. Studying Ansky will help us to better understand black holes and how they evolve.”

“XMM-Newton played a pivotal role in our study. It is the only X-ray telescope sensitive enough to detect the fainter X-ray background light between the bursts. With XMM-Newton we could measure how dim Ansky gets, which enabled us to calculate how much energy Ansky releases when it lights up and starts flashing.”

Black hole (artist's impression)

Credit: European Space Agency, NASA and Felix Mirabel (the French Atomic Energy Commission & the Institute for Astronomy and Space Physics/Conicet of Argentina)
Licence: ESA Standard Licence

Unravelling puzzling behaviour

The gravity of a black hole captures matter that gets too close and can rip it apart. The matter from a captured star, for example, would be spread into a hot, bright, rapidly spinning disc called an accretion disc. Current thinking is that QPEs are caused by an object (that could be a star or a small black hole) interacting with this accretion disc and they have been linked to the destruction of a star. But there is no evidence that Ansky has destroyed a star.

The extraordinary characteristics of Ansky’s recurring bursts prompted the research team to consider other possibilities. The accretion disc could be formed by gas captured by the black hole from its neighbourhood, and not a disintegrated star. In this scenario, the X-ray flares would be coming from highly energetic shocks in the disc, provoked by a small celestial object travelling through and disrupting the orbiting material, repeatedly.

“The bursts of X-rays from Ansky are ten times longer and ten times more luminous than what we see from a typical QPE,” says Joheen Chakraborty, a team member and PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA.

“Each of these eruptions is releasing a hundred times more energy than we have seen elsewhere. Ansky’s eruptions also show the longest cadence ever observed, of about 4.5 days. This pushes our models to their limits and challenges our existing ideas about how these X-ray flashes are being generated.”

Watching a black hole in action

Being able to watch Ansky evolving in real time is an unprecedented opportunity for astronomers to learn more about black holes and the energetic events they power.

“For QPEs, we’re still at the point where we have more models than data, and we need more observations to understand what's happening,” says ESA Research Fellow and X-ray astronomer, Erwan Quintin.

“We thought that QPEs were the result of small celestial objects being captured by much larger ones and spiralling down towards them. Ansky’s eruptions seem to be telling us a different story. These repetitive bursts are also likely associated with gravitational waves that ESA’s future mission LISA might be able to catch.”

“It’s crucial to have these X-ray observations that will complement the gravitational wave data and help us solve the puzzling behaviour of massive black holes.”

LISA-inspired artwork
Credit: ESA
Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO or ESA Standard Licence (content can be used under either licence)

Source: ESA/Science Exploration

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Notes for editors

Discovery of extreme Quasi-Periodic Eruptions in a newly accreting massive black hole by L. Hernandez-García et al. is published today in Nature Astronomy. DOI 10.1038/s41550-025-02523-9

Dr Lorena Hernandez-Garcia is also a researcher at the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics and Millennium Nucleus TITANS, Chile.

SDSS1335+0728: The awakening of a ∼106 M⊙ black hole by P. Sánchez-Sáez et al. was published in the August 2024 edition of Astronomy & Astrophysics.

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Have we been wrong about why Mars is red?

Global Mars in colour
Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/G. Michael
Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO or ESA Standard Licence
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How Mars turned red
Credit: ESA
Acknownledgements: ATG Europe, based on Valantinas et al (2025)
Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO or ESA Standard Licence

Lab-made ‘martian dust’
Credit: A.Valantinas
Licence: No ESA licences available

Ferrihydrite vs. hematite as a match for martian dust
Credit: A.Valantinas/ESA
Licence: ESA Standard Licence

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The Red Planet’s iconic rusty dust has a much wetter history than previously assumed, find scientists combining European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA spacecraft data with new laboratory experiments on replica Mars dust. The results suggest that Mars rusted early in the planet’s ancient past, when liquid water was more widespread.

Mars is easily identifiable in the night sky by its prominent red hue. Thanks to the fleet of spacecraft that have studied the planet over the last decades, we know that this red colour is due to rusted iron minerals in the dust. That is, iron bound up in Mars’s rocks has at some point reacted with liquid water, or water and oxygen in the air, similar to how rust forms on Earth.

Over billions of years this rusty material – iron oxide – has been broken down into dust and spread all around the planet by winds, a process that continues today.

But iron oxides come in many flavours, and the exact chemistry of martian rust has been intensely debated because how it formed is a window into the planet’s environmental conditions at the time. And closely linked to that is the question of whether Mars has ever been habitable.

Previous studies of the iron oxide component of the martian dust based on spacecraft observations alone did not find evidence of water contained within it. Researchers had therefore concluded that this particular type of iron oxide must be hematite, formed under dry surface conditions through reactions with the martian atmosphere over billions of years – after Mars’s early wet period.

However, new analysis of spacecraft observations in combination with novel laboratory techniques shows that Mars’s red colour is better matched by iron oxides containing water, known as ferrihydrite. Ferrihydrite typically forms quickly in the presence of cool water, and so must have formed when Mars still had water on its surface. The ferrihydrite has kept its watery signature to the present day, despite being ground down and spread around the planet since its formation.

“We were trying to create a replica martian dust in the laboratory using different types of iron oxide. We found that ferrihydrite mixed with basalt, a volcanic rock, best fits the minerals seen by spacecraft at Mars,” says lead author Adomas Valantinas, a postdoc at Brown University in the US, formerly at the University of Bern in Switzerland where he started his work with ESA’s Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) data.

“Mars is still the Red Planet. It’s just that our understanding of why Mars is red has been transformed. The major implication is that because ferrihydrite could only have formed when water was still present on the surface, Mars rusted earlier than we previously thought. Moreover, the ferrihydrite remains stable under present-day conditions on Mars.”

Other studies have also suggested ferrihydrite might be present in martian dust, but Adomas and colleagues have provided the first comprehensive proof through the unique combination of space mission data and novel laboratory experiments.

They created the replica martian dust using an advanced grinder machine to achieve the realistic dust grain size equivalent to 1/100th of a human hair. They then analysed their samples using the same techniques as orbiting spacecraft in order to make a direct comparison, finally identifying ferrihydrite as the best match.

Data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, together with ground-based measurements from NASA Mars rovers Curiosity, Pathfinder and Opportunity, also helped make the case for ferrihydrite.

“We eagerly await the results from upcoming missions like ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover and the NASA-ESA Mars Sample Return, which will allow us to probe deeper into what makes Mars red,” adds Colin.

“Some of the samples already collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover and awaiting return to Earth include dust; once we get these precious samples into the lab, we’ll be able to measure exactly how much ferrihydrite the dust contains, and what this means for our understanding of the history of water – and the possibility for life – on Mars.”

For a little while longer, though, Mars’s red hue will continue to be admired and puzzled over from afar.

Source: ESA/Space Science

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Notes for editors

‘Detection of ferrihydrite in Martian red dust records ancient cold and wet conditions on Mars’ by A. Valantinas et al is published today in Nature Communications.

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For more information please contact:

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Euclid discovers a stunning Einstein ring

Euclid image of a bright Einstein ring around galaxy NGC 6505
Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, G. Anselmi, T. Li
Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO or ESA Standard Licence
(content can be used under either licence)

Close-up of the Einstein ring around galaxy NGC 6505
Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, G. Anselmi, T. Li
Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO or ESA Standard Licence
(content can be used under either licence)

Infographic explaining how an Einstein Ring is formed
Credit: ESA
Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
(content can be used under either licence)

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Euclid, the European Space Agency’s dark Universe detective, has made an astonishing discovery – right in our cosmic backyard.

Euclid blasted off on its six-year mission to explore the dark Universe on 1 July 2023. Before the spacecraft could begin its survey, the team of scientists and engineers on Earth had to make sure everything was working properly. During this early testing phase, in September 2023, Euclid sent some images back to Earth. They were deliberately out of focus, but in one fuzzy image Euclid Archive Scientist Bruno Altieri saw a hint of a very special phenomenon and decided to take a closer look.

“I look at the data from Euclid as it comes in,” explains Bruno. “Even from that first observation, I could see it, but after Euclid made more observations of the area, we could see a perfect Einstein ring. For me, with a lifelong interest in gravitational lensing, that was amazing.”

The Einstein Ring, an extremely rare phenomenon, turned out to be hiding in plain sight in a galaxy not far away. The galaxy, called NGC 6505, is around 590 million light-years from Earth, a stone’s throw away in cosmic terms. But this is the first time that the ring of light surrounding its centre is detected, thanks to Euclid’s high-resolution instruments.

The ring around the foreground galaxy is made up of light from a farther out bright galaxy. This background galaxy is 4.42 billion light-years away, and its light has been distorted by gravity on its way to us. The far-away galaxy hasn’t been observed before and doesn’t yet have a name.

“An Einstein ring is an example of strong gravitational lensing,” explains Conor O’Riordan, of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Germany, and lead author of the first scientific paper analysing the ring. “All strong lenses are special, because they're so rare, and they're incredibly useful scientifically. This one is particularly special, because it’s so close to Earth and the alignment makes it very beautiful.”

Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicts that light will bend around objects in space, so that they focus the light like a giant lens. This gravitational lensing effect is bigger for more massive objects – galaxies and clusters of galaxies. It means we can sometimes see the light from distant galaxies that would otherwise be hidden.

If the alignment is just right, the light from the distant source galaxy bends to form a spectacular ring around the foreground object. These Einstein rings are a rich laboratory for scientists. Studying their gravitational effects can help us learn about the expansion of the Universe, detect the effects of invisible dark matter and dark energy, and investigate the background source whose light is bent by dark matter in between us and the source.

“I find it very intriguing that this ring was observed within a well-known galaxy, which was first discovered in 1884,” says Valeria Pettorino, ESA Euclid Project Scientist. “The galaxy has been known to astronomers for a very long time. And yet this ring was never observed before. This demonstrates how powerful Euclid is, finding new things even in places we thought we knew well. This discovery is very encouraging for the future of the Euclid mission and demonstrates its fantastic capabilities.

By exploring how the Universe has expanded and formed over its cosmic history, Euclid will reveal more about the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter. The space telescope will map more than a third of the sky, observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years. It is expected to find around 100 000 strong lenses, but to find one that’s so spectacular – and so close to home – is astonishing. Until now, less than 1000 strong lenses were known, and even fewer were imaged at high resolution.

“Euclid is going to revolutionise the field, with all this data we've never had before,” adds Conor.

Although this Einstein ring is stunning, Euclid’s main job is searching for the more subtle effects of weak gravitational lensing, where background galaxies appear only mildly stretched or displaced. To detect this effect, scientists will need to analyse billions of galaxies. Euclid began its detailed survey of the sky on 14 February 2024 and is gradually creating the most extensive 3D map of the Universe yet. Such an amazing find, so early in its mission, means Euclid is on course to uncover many more hidden secrets.

Source: ESA/Science & Exploration

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Notes for editors

• Euclid: A complete Einstein ring in NGC 6505 by C. M. O’Riordan et al is published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics. DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202453014 
• For more information, please contact ESA media relations: media@esa.int

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Webb peeks into Perseus

A nebula made up of cloudy gas and dust in the form of soft and wispy clouds and, in the centre, thin and highly detailed layers pressed close together. Large, bright stars surrounded by six long points of light are dotted over the image, as well as some small, point-like stars embedded in the clouds. The clouds are lit up in blue close to the stars; orange colours show clouds that glow in infrared light. Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Scholz, K. Muzic, A. Langeveld, R. Jayawardhana

This stunning new mosaic of images from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope showcases the nearby star-forming cluster, NGC 1333. The nebula is in the Perseus molecular cloud, and located approximately 960 light-years away.

Webb’s superb sensitivity allows astronomers to investigate young objects with extremely low masses. Some of the faintest ‘stars’ in the picture are in fact newly born free-floating brown dwarfs with masses comparable to those of giant planets.

The same cluster was featured as the 33rd anniversary image of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope in April 2023. Hubble’s image just scratched the surface of this region, because clouds of dust obscure much of the star formation process. Observing with larger aperture and in the infrared part of the spectrum, Webb is capable of peering through the dusty veil to reveal newborn stars, brown dwarfs and planetary mass objects.

The centre of the image presents a deep peek into the heart of the NGC1333 cloud. Across the image we see large patches of orange, which represent gas glowing in the infrared. These so-called Herbig-Haro objects form when ionised material ejected from young stars collides with the surrounding cloud. They are hallmarks of a very active site of star formation.

Many of the young stars in this image are surrounded by disks of gas and dust, which may eventually produce planetary systems. Similar to the young stars in this mosaic, our own Sun and planets formed inside a dusty molecular cloud, 4.6 billion years ago. Our Sun did not form in isolation but as part of a cluster, which was perhaps even more massive than NGC 1333. The cluster in the mosaic, only 1-3 million years old, presents us with an opportunity to study stars like our Sun, as well as brown dwarfs and free-floating planets, in their nascent stages.

The images were captured as part of the Webb observation programme 1202 (PI: A. Scholz) to survey a large portion of NGC 1333. These data constitute the first deep spectroscopic survey of the young cluster, and have identified brown dwarfs down to planetary masses using the observatory’s Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS). The first results from this survey have been accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal.

Source: ESA

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Space Science

JWST | Webb

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