ESA's XMM-Newton Mission News.

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http://sci.esa.int/xmm-newton/58072...ew-way-to-study-matter-close-to-a-black-hole/

12 July 2016
ESA's orbiting X-ray observatory, XMM-Newton, has proved the existence of a 'gravitational vortex' around a black hole. The discovery, aided by NASA's NuSTAR mission, solves a mystery that has eluded astronomers for more than 30 years and will allow them to map the behaviour of matter very close to black holes. It could also open the door to future investigations of Albert Einstein's general relativity.
 

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XMM-Newton takes selfie:

http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2016/12/Space_selfie

Image explanation
In the image on the left, one camera captured the Sun side of one of XMM’s solar wings (at left in the image), and the dark multilayer insulation on the service module, the bright Sun-shielding behind and a dark box-like structure topped by a pair of thrusters (at right in the image). 
In the image on the right, the other camera captured the dark tripod of the S-band antenna (at left in the image) and then the 2A/2B thruster pair (at centre) and XMM’s other solar wing (at right).
 

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Title Star-circling bubble of gas
Released 11/06/2018 9:00 am
Copyright ESA/XMM-Newton; J. Toalá; D.Goldman
Description
This turbulent celestial palette of purple and yellow shows a bubble of gas named NGC 3199, blown by a star known as WR18 (Wolf-Rayet 18).
Wolf-Rayet stars are massive, powerful, and energetic stars that are just about reaching the end of their lives. They flood their surroundings with thick, intense, fast-moving winds that push and sweep at the material found there, carving out weird and wonderful shapes as they do so. These winds can create strong shockwaves when they collide with the comparatively cool interstellar medium, causing them to heat up anything in their vicinity. This process can heat material to such high temperatures that it is capable of emitting X-rays, a type of radiation emitted only by highly energetic phenomena in the Universe.

http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2018/06/Star-circling_bubble_of_gas
 

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18 June 2018
ESA’s XMM-Newton observatory has discovered the best-ever candidate for a very rare and elusive type of cosmic phenomenon: a medium-weight black hole in the process of tearing apart and feasting on a nearby star.
There are various types of black hole lurking throughout the Universe: massive stars create stellar-mass black holes when they die, while galaxies host supermassive black holes at their centres, with masses equivalent to millions or billions of Suns.

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Star_shredded_by_rare_breed_of_black_hole
 

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20 June 2018
After a nearly twenty-year long game of cosmic hide-and-seek, astronomers using ESA’s XMM-Newton space observatory have finally found evidence of hot, diffuse gas permeating the cosmos, closing a puzzling gap in the overall budget of ‘normal’ matter in the Universe.
While the mysterious dark matter and dark energy make up about 25 and 70 percent of our cosmos respectively, the ordinary matter that makes up everything we see – from stars and galaxies to planets and people – amounts to only about five percent.
But even this five percent turns out to be quite hard to track down.

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/XMM-Newton_finds_missing_intergalactic_material
 

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21 November 2018
Based on a new theoretical model, a team of scientists explored the rich data archive of ESA's XMM-Newton and NASA's Chandra space observatories to find pulsating X-ray emission from three sources. The discovery, relying on previous gamma-ray observations of the pulsars, provides a novel tool to investigate the mysterious mechanisms of pulsar emission, which will be important to understand these fascinating objects and use them for space navigation in the future.

http://sci.esa.int/xmm-newton/60950...npoints-previously-unnoticed-pulsar-emission/
 

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20 March 2019
By surveying the centre of our Galaxy, ESA’s XMM-Newton has discovered two colossal ‘chimneys’ funneling material from the vicinity of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole into two huge cosmic bubbles.
The giant bubbles were discovered in 2010 by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope: one stretches above the plane of the Milky Way galaxy and the other below, forming a shape akin to a colossal hourglass that spans about 50 000 light years – around half the diameter of the entire Galaxy. They can be thought of as giant ‘burps’ of material from the central regions of our Milky Way, where its central black hole, known as Sagittarius A*, resides.

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Giant_chimneys_vent_X-rays_from_Milky_Way_s_core
 

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