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Besides light, the Sun sends out particles in the form of solar wind and in large bursts called coronal mass ejections. Understanding how these streams and bursts of particles get pushed out from the Sun could help improve our forecasts of space weather reaching Earth.
Recently, the European Space Agency’s Proba-3 mission demonstrated that it filled the ‘solar observation gap’. It can see movement to unprecedented detail in the hard-to-observe region between the Sun’s surface and higher up in its outer atmosphere (the corona). This makes it possible to closely track solar wind as it sets off from the inner corona.
This image is a still from a video. The (artificially coloured) yellow part of the video shows the Sun in ultraviolet light, recorded by the SWAP telescope on ESA's Proba-2 spacecraft. The greyscale area around it is based on data captured in visible light by the ASPIICS coronagraph on Proba-3. This data is processed to enhance contrast.
In the video, you can see flows of solar wind moving away from the Sun in all directions. In some regions, particularly around the bottom of the video, you can see some material also falling back towards the Sun. In the second half of the video, a coronal mass ejection expands towards the right.
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Credits: ESA/Proba-3/ASPIICS & ESA/Proba-2/SWAP (ROB), A. Debrabandere (ROB)
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Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to directly image 29 Cygni b, which weighs 15 times Jupiter. They found evidence for heavy chemical elements like carbon and oxygen, which strongly suggests it formed like a planet by accretion within a protoplanetary disc, and not like a star through fragmentation.
Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) was used in its coronagraphic mode, in which a wedge (indicated by the blue box) is used to block the light of the host star (labeled A and marked with a star symbol) to reveal the planet. This image combines light from three filters between 4 and 5 microns. The planet is brightest in the blue filter, then green, then red, so it appears as an off-white dot in the colour composite. If carbon dioxide weren’t present, the planet would appear noticeably redder.
In this image, the colour blue is assigned to 4.1 micron light, green to 4.3 micron light, and red to 4.6 micron light.
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Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, W. Balmer (JHU, STScI), L. Pueyo (STScI). Image processing: A. Pagan (STScI); CC BY 4.0
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On 8 April, teams from the European Space Agency (ESA) and industry partners gathered at ESA’s Navigation Lab at ESTEC, the agency’s technical heart in the Netherlands.
After moments full of anticipation, they received the very first navigation signal from the Celeste mission, marking the first successful transmission of a navigation signal from a European satellite in low Earth orbit.
The Celeste mission is ESA’s initiative for Low Earth Orbit Positioning, Navigation and Timing (LEO-PNT) and is currently in its in-orbit demonstration phase.
ESTEC’s Navigation Lab is at the core of all ESA's Navigation testing activities, and so was a natural choice to receive the mission’s first signal. But there is one other reason – more than 10 years ago, this very lab was where another milestone for European navigation took place: the first determination of a ground location using satellites in the Galileo constellation.
Credits: ESA-R. Moorkens O'Reilly
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The Sun is continuously sending out streams of charged particles called the solar wind. Some of this wind is sent out in gusts along (aptly named) ‘streamers’, which look like bright rays pointing out from the Sun.
Comparing directions to the numbers on a clock, the brightest streamers in this image point out from 1 o'clock and 8 o'clock.
This image was recorded on 16 July 2025. At this time, the Sun was at solar maximum, the most active time in the 11-year solar cycle. This meant streamers carrying solar wind could point in all directions.
As the Sun’s activity slows down over the next few years and the Sun’s magnetic field becomes less chaotic, streamers will mostly come from near the solar equator.
The (artificially coloured) yellow part of the image shows the Sun in ultraviolet light, recorded by the SWAP telescope on ESA's Proba-2 spacecraft. The green image around it was captured in visible light by the ASPIICS coronagraph on ESA's Proba-3.
Proba-3 is unique in that no other spacecraft can observe this level of detail this close to the Sun. On top of this, it takes images quickly. Combining these images into a video makes it possible to closely track solar wind in the Sun's outer atmosphere, called the corona.
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[Image description: A square image with the Sun in the centre. The Sun looks yellow, with bright and dark regions. Surrounding this central image is a different image in green, showing green glowing arcs and rays extending out from the Sun. Two large rays stand out in the top centre-right and bottom left.]
Credits: ESA/Proba-3/ASPIICS & ESA/Proba-2/SWAP, A. Zhukov (ROB)
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At 17:07 local time (Pacific) on 10 April (01:07 BST/02:07 CEST on 11 April), NASA's Orion spacecraft and its crew splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean, marking the successful end of the Artemis II mission, humankind's first journey around the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.
ESA's European Service Module powered the spacecraft over 1 million kilometres through in deep space, providing air and water for the astronauts, generating electrical power via its four solar arrays, maintaining thermal control and delivering propulsion.
Mostly built by European industry under ESA leadership, the European Service Module was assembled by Airbus Defence and Space in Bremen, Germany, with contributions from companies across 13 European countries, involving 20 main contractors and over 100 European suppliers.
Throughout the mission, European engineers supported operations around the clock from ESA's centres in the Netherlands and Germany, as well as alongside NASA teams in Houston, ensuring Orion and its crew completed their journey safely around the Moon and back home.
Credits: NASA
A killer itch and a trapped group of strangers make for a tense, if uneven, horror that balances grisly shocks with sketchy character drama
This horror is set in a world where a highly contagious disease causes itching so severe that the scratching proves quickly fatal; finally, a film targeting the under-served eczema community! The body horror elements are realised extremely effectively, with a woman literally tearing at her skin being the most effective set-piece. Alas, the film doesn’t have the scope (on what was clearly a modest budget) to indulge in very many of these. Much of the rest of the runtime is the pressure-cooker conversation that occurs between a motley crew of so-far-uninfected civilians caught out at a department store. While the reason they are trapped is horrific, this makes the film at least as much a character study as it is a horror, with variable results.
Scenarios from classic films which the film-makers may have had in mind include the hard-pressed band of isolated scientists confronting a shape-shifting monster in John Carpenter’s The Thing, the mismatched duo defending a defunct police station under siege in John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, or even a non-John Carpenter film, Night of the Living Dead, in which survivors hole up in a farmhouse. The key to these types of films is a blend of genre excitement and character dynamics. It would have been great to see more of this from Itch!: on the one hand, a slightly bigger budget for more of the gnarly effects it pulls off so well in some brief scenes, and on the other, a sharper script to serve the human aspect.
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