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
Go to topicProtecting life and infrastructure on Earth and in orbit
Go to topicUsing space to benefit citizens and meet future challenges on Earth
Go to topicMaking space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
Go to topicThank you for liking
You have already liked this page, you can only like it once!
This all-sky image was obtained by ESA's Integral gamma-ray observatory during four years of operations and provides an important step towards estimating how many black holes there are in the Universe.
The sources in this image were artificially blurred and the colour map was stretched to make both strong and weak sources readily visible. The concentration of sources along the mid plane of the image is due to neutron stars and stellar mass black holes in our Galaxy, while the majority of sources located far away from the Galactic plane are super-massive black holes in other galaxies. The Cosmic X-ray Background is composed from the emission of tens of millions of similar objects much further away from us.
Superposed is an Earth image by ESA/EUMETSAT’s Meteosat satellite. Using the Earth as a shield to block the emission from the population of distant black holes astronomers precisely gauged the X-ray and gamma-ray background. An angular size of the Earth as seen from Integral during actual observations was smaller than shown in the image.