About ESA
The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
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Space in Member States
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Germany
Austria
Belgium
Denmark
Spain
Estonia
Finland
France
Greece
Hungary
Ireland
Italy
Luxembourg
Norway
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Poland
Portugal
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Science & Exploration
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
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Enabling & Support
Making space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
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Gravitational lensing
Massive cosmic objects, from single stars to galaxy clusters, bend and focus the light that flows around them with their gravity, acting like giant magnifying glasses. This effect is called gravitational lensing or, when it is detected on tiny patches on the sky, microlensing.
A team of astronomers used the magnifying effect of the stars located in a spiral galaxy to ‘zoom in’ to another galaxy, known as PKS 1830-211, that lies along the same line of sight from Earth but is much farther away. Thanks to this unusual set-up, they could pick out very small structures in the distant galaxy, corresponding to the vicinity of the supermassive black hole. The black hole is devouring material from its surroundings while firing powerful jets of particles that emit light up to the high energies of gamma rays. Observing these jets with ESA’s Integral and NASA’s Fermi and Swift satellites, the astronomers could measure the size of the region around the black hole where they originate.
Our telescopes will never be powerful enough to reveal these inner regions, but the intervening gravitational lens made the measurement possible. This is the first time that gravitational microlensing has been used with gamma rays to dissect the high-energy processes taking place around a supermassive black hole.
