Heads of four European aerospace companies last week signed an agreement
to create Euro-Hermespace, a corporation to develop the Europe: spaceplane
Hermes. Unfortunately for the signatories, member states of the European
Space Agency have still not decided to proceed with the Hermes project.
The French companies Dassault and Aerospatiale hold 51.6 per cent
of stock in the new corporation. Deutsche Aerospace holds 33.4 per cent
and Italy’s Alenia 15 per cent. In a move which looks like an attempt to
draw Hermes’s harshest critic, Germany, fully into the venture, the president
of Euro-Hermespace’s supervisory board has been named as Johann Schaffler,
deputy head of Deutsche Aerospace.
The future of the spaceplane was to have been decided by ministers meeting
in Munich last November, but because of escalating costs and a lack of money
they postponed the go-ahead for another year. A decision is now expected
at the end of this year.
Director-general of the new corporation, Philippe Couillard of the
French firm Aerospatiale, warned that the Hermes programme could not proceed
without some long-term investment before the final decision. ‘Investment
implies future commitments. We can no longer say we are getting on with
the programme if we do not invest, but our investment choices will be prudent
ones,’ he said.
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![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)
