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
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The main panel of this graphic is a visible light image taken by the Digitized Sky Survey around the galaxy known as GSN 069. The inset gives a time-lapse of data taken by NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory over a period of about 20 hours on 14 and 15 February 2019. The sequence loops over again to show how the X-ray brightness of the source in the centre of GSN 069 regularly changes dramatically over that span.
ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray space observatory was the first to spot this phenomenon, detecting two bursts separated by nine hours on 24 December 2018. Scientists then followed up with more XMM-Newton observations on 16 and 17 January, finding five outbursts, and with Chandra less than a month later, revealing an additional three outbursts.
Although never before observed, scientists think periodic flares like these – referred to as ‘quasi-periodic eruptions’, or QPEs – might actually be quite common in the Universe.