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!
These early snapshots demonstrate the return of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to full science operations, following correction of a computer anomaly aboard the spacecraft. Normal science observations were restarted on July 17, at 1:18 pm EDT. Among the early targets are globular star clusters in other galaxies and aurorae on the giant planet Jupiter, in addition to a look at bizarre galaxies.
These two peculiar galaxies are part of a program led by Julianne Dalcanton of the University of Washington in Seattle, to survey oddball galaxies scattered across the sky.
LEFT — ARP-MADORE2115-273 is a rare example of an interacting galaxy pair in the southern hemisphere. These Hubble observations provide Hubble's first high-resolution glimpse at this intriguing system, which is located 297 million light-years away. Astronomers had previously thought this was a "collisional ring" system due to the head-on merger of two galaxies. The new Hubble observations show that the ongoing interaction between the galaxies is far more complex, leaving behind a rich network of stars and dusty gas.
RIGHT — ARP-MADORE0002-503 is a large spiral galaxy with unusual, extended spiral arms, at a distance of 490 million light-years. Its arms extend out to a radius of 163,000 light-years, making it three times more expansive than our Milky Way Galaxy. While most disk galaxies have an even number of spiral arms, this one has three.