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.
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
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This artist's impression shows a high-mass binary system, composed of a supergiant luminous star (in blue) and a compact stellar object, such as a neutron star.
As discovered by ESA's Integral observatory, many of these supergiant systems produce strong and exceptionally fast-rising X-ray outbursts lasting a few hours only, hence their name 'supergiant fast X-ray transients'.
The outbursts may depend on the way stellar material is exchanged between the supergiant star and the compact object.
The light curve at the bottom-right was retrieved by Integral from the supergiant fast X-ray transient source IGR J17544-2619 on 17 September 2003.
The curve shows a very fast X-ray outburst from the compact object, lasting about two hours only, with very fast rise and slow decay. The counterpart of this source is a luminous supergiant, unambiguously identified by ESA's XMM-Newton and NASA's Chandra X-ray observatories.