On 28 September, ESA’s Juice mission reached another important Jupiter-bound milestone with its penultimate gravity assist manoeuvre: a flyby of Earth. This encounter, however, was not only an essential step on the road to Jupiter, but an opportunity to rehearse the observations and operations that will define Juice’s exploration of the Jovian system.
Astronomers have identified the most massive stellar black hole yet discovered in the Milky Way galaxy. This black hole was spotted in data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission because it imposes an odd ‘wobbling’ motion on the companion star orbiting it. Data from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) and other ground-based observatories were used to verify the mass of the black hole, putting it at an impressive 33 times that of the Sun.
How many earth-like planets orbit the habitable zone of solar-like stars? How planets form and evolve in their planetary systems? What about the interaction with their stars? These are among the questions the ESA PLATO mission is called to answer, through exquisite...
