Category Astronomy/Space

More than 30 years ago, the European comet mission Giotto flew past Halley’s comet. The Bernese ion mass spectrometer IMS, led by Prof. em. Hans Balsiger, was on board. A key finding from the measurements taken by this instrument was that there appeared to be a lack of nitrogen in Halley’s coma – the nebulous covering of comets which forms when a comet passes close to the sun...

ESA’s technical heart has begun to produce oxygen out of simulated moondust. A prototype oxygen plant has been set up in the Materials and Electrical Components Laboratory of the European Space Research and Technology Centre, ESTEC, based in Noordwijk in the Netherlands.

“Having our own facility allows us to focus on oxygen production, measuring it with a mass spectrometer as it is extracted from the regolith simulant,” comments Beth Lomax of the University of Glasgow, whose Ph.D. work is being supported through ESA’s Networking and Partnering Initiative, harnessing advanced academic research for space applications.

“Being able to acquire oxygen from resources found on the Moon would obviously be hugely useful for future lunar settlers, both...

ESA’s XMM-Newton has discovered that gas lurking within the Milky Way’s halo reaches far hotter temperatures than previously thought and has a different chemical make-up than predicted, challenging our understanding of our galactic home.

A halo is a vast region of gas, stars and invisible dark matter surrounding a galaxy. It is a key component of a galaxy, connecting it to wider intergalactic space, and is thus thought to play an important role in galactic evolution.

Until now, a galaxy’s halo was thought to contain hot gas at a single temperature, with the exact temperature of this gas dependent on the mass of the galaxy.

However, a new study using ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray space observatory now shows that the Milky Way’s halo contains no...

Warm, cold, just right? Physicists at the University of California, Davis are taking the temperature of dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up about a quarter of our universe.

We have very little idea of what dark matter is and physicists have yet to detect a dark matter particle. But we do know that the gravity of clumps of dark matter can distort light from distant objects. Chris Fassnacht, a physics professor at UC Davis and colleagues are using this distortion, called gravitational lensing, to learn more about the properties of dark matter.

The standard model for dark matter is ...