Out into the Universe

Immediately after the Big Bang, around 14 billion years ago, the Universe was extremely hot, dense, and formless, before it expanded, cooled, and gave birth to the galaxies, stars, and planets that light our night sky. ESA has developed a series of extraordinary observatories spanning the electromagnetic spectrum to study these objects and more. 

Planck is mapping remnant light from just 300,000 years after the Big Bang, studying faint structures in this cosmic microwave background to understand how the Universe was born and its early evolution.

Herschel is probing dense, dusty clouds in the Milky Way and other galaxies to study the assembly of gas, dust, and ice into clusters of protostars and their nascent planetary systems.

XMM-Newton and INTEGRAL are investigating the high-energy Universe to understand how physics operates in the most extreme environments, including black holes, neutron stars, and gamma ray bursts. 

The joint NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is tracing the evolution of galaxies over cosmic time, and its larger, more sensitive successor, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, will extend these studies back to the very first galaxies and stars, as well as search for embryonic stars and planets in today’s Universe.

Gaia will measure the brightness, colour, position, and motion of a billion stars in the Milky Way, enabling us to build up the most accurate 3D map of our galaxy and understand its origin and its future fate. 

LISA Pathfinder will test new high-precision technologies needed to detect the tiny ripples in spacetime created when black holes collide and merge, paving the way to a future gravitational wave observatory.

Euclid will map the shapes and 3D distribution of galaxies across the sky to measure its geometry and reveal the role played by dark matter, which lies in invisible haloes around galaxies but acts gravitationally on them, and dark energy, which is thought to be causing the Universe to expand at an ever-increasing rate.