European Space Agency
Every Cosmic Herald story on European Space Agency — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
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Science & Discovery
Hubble Catches a Tiny Galaxy Burning Off the Cosmic Fog, 1.4 Billion Years After the Big Bang
Astronomers used Hubble to catch ionizing UV light escaping a small, furiously star-forming galaxy in the reionization epoch — the first such detection, and direct evidence for how the early universe became transparent.
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Science & Discovery
Gravity as a telescope: how Einstein rings are mapping dark matter
Gravitational lensing bends light from distant galaxies around massive foreground objects, creating arcs and Einstein rings. Astronomers have turned this relativistic quirk into a precision instrument for weighing dark matter — and the results are reshaping cosmological models.
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Science & Discovery
Phosphine on Venus: four years later, what the research actually says
The 2020 claim that phosphine — a potential biosignature gas — had been detected in Venus's atmosphere sparked one of the most contentious debates in recent planetary science. Years of follow-up observations and analysis have clarified the picture, though not fully resolved it.
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Science & Discovery
The Sun is at its most active in two decades. What solar maximum actually means.
Solar Cycle 25 has been more active than forecasters predicted, delivering some of the strongest geomagnetic storms in years and producing aurora visible at unusually low latitudes. What solar maximum means for technology, satellites, and power grids — and how we prepare — is more relevant now than it has been in a generation.
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Science & Discovery
How black holes actually grow: new X-ray observations are filling in the picture
Black holes grow by consuming nearby gas and dust — but the details of how that accretion works, and how it produces the relativistic jets that extend for millions of light-years, are still being worked out. A new generation of X-ray telescopes is catching the process in action.
