Mastering the universe

About 15 billion years ago our young universe was just beginning to change. While light from the most distant stars takes about 10 billion years to reach us, if we could look back beyond that time we would be able to catch a glimpse of the universe when the first massive stars began to form — a turbulent time filled with gigantic black holes that devoured everything around them.

To give astronomers an insight into this violent period of our universe’s history ESA plans to launch a permanent X-ray observatory known as XEUS (X-ray Evolving Universe Spectroscopy).

Expected to be launched within the next 10 years, its core mission will be to pick up faint background radiation and scan the heavens studying black holes and distant galaxy groups at the outer edges of the universe. If successful, XEUS will analyse X-rays that began their journey from the deepest parts of space when the universe was still in its infancy and could answer questions about the mysteries of deep space that have baffled scientists for years.

The planned telescope is the follow-up to XMM-Newton, ESA’s trailblazing success story that has been providing unique images of distant galaxies for the past seven years. XMM’s unique design, consisting of more than 170 wafer-thin cylindrical mirrors spread over three telescopes, meant that astronomers could, for the first time, measure the influence of a neutron star’s gravitational field on the light it emits — a huge breakthrough.