ALT Artist’s impression depicting how nuclear explosions on a neutron star feed the jets blasting off from its magnetic polar regions. In the foreground, at the centre right, there is a very bright white ball, representing the neutron star. White/purple filaments are streaming out from its polar region. The ball is surrounded by a hazy white larger sphere, the corona, and further out by a disk with concentric bands of different colours, going from white in the inner disk to orange in the middle and to red-magenta in the outer region. An orange band connects the outer part of the disk to a large yellow-orange-red section of a sphere in the top left corner. This represents the star companion of the neutron star, that is feeding the disk around the bright white spherical body.

ALT A graphic showcasing ESA’s astronomy missions, including collaborative missions with partner agencies and upcoming missions of opportunity. The graphic indicates which missions are in development in the upper part, active in the middle and legacy at the bottom. The missions are also organised by wavelength from microwaves at the far left to gravitational waves at the far right.

ALT An image of Earth from above fills the lower right part of the figure. It’s a spherical bluish surface mostly covered in white clouds – there’s a thin layer of light blue and dark magenta around Earth’s surface. A gold-colour satellite hovers in the dark-blue sky above, on the right side, this is the China Seismo-Electromagnetic Satellite. It has the shape of a cubic box with six long antennas sticking out. A blueish-magenta beam enters diagonally from the top-left of the image and strikes the top magenta hazy layer around the Earth, resulting in an intense and brighter magenta-coloured diffuse cloud around the white strike point. This illustrates the energy of the gamma-ray burst hitting Earth’s ionosphere. In the top-left part of the figure the magenta beam intersects a depiction of ESA’s Integral spacecraft, which has the shape of a shoebox, mostly gold in colour with the rectangular wings of the solar-panels sticking out on either side.

ALT An image of Earth from above fills the lower right part of the figure. It’s a spherical bluish surface mostly covered in white clouds – there’s a thin layer of light blue and dark magenta around Earth’s surface. A gold-colour satellite hovers in the dark-blue sky above, on the right side, this is the China Seismo-Electromagnetic Satellite. It has the shape of a cubic box with six long antennas sticking out. A blueish-magenta beam enters diagonally from the top-left of the image and strikes the top magenta hazy layer around the Earth, resulting in an intense and brighter magenta-coloured diffuse cloud around the white strike point. This illustrates the energy of the gamma-ray burst hitting Earth’s ionosphere. In the top-left part of the figure the magenta beam intersects a depiction of ESA’s Integral spacecraft, which has the shape of a shoebox, mostly gold in colour with the rectangular wings of the solar-panels sticking out on either side

ALT This illustration shows ESA's INTEGRAL gamma-ray observatory in orbit against a background of stars. At the rear of the spacecraft is a silver box with two gray, segmented solar panels extending from it like wings. In front of this is a variety of instruments and other hardware wrapped in gold and silver foil. Pointed toward us are a dark gray circle covered in small white dots, a black square crisscrossed with thin lines, and four smaller circular features. The image is watermarked “Artist’s concept” and “Credit: ESA.”