Space is pretty.

I know, I  know, it’s a controversial take. The rainbow of colors, the unfathomable sizes.

I love how it looks as my desktop background,  but I also love how they make me feel like I’m  one small part of something so much grander. But whatever feelings a picture  of outer space evokes in you, many of them aren’t just nice to look at. Astronomers can also use them  for cutting-edge research.

So here are the top 10 space pictures of  2024, and the knowledge they unlocked. [♪ INTRO] First, let’s talk about our friend Euclid. Not the ancient Greek mathematician. I’m talking about the European Space  Agency’s telescope that launched last summer.

Euclid’s main goal is to investigate the  large-scale structure of the universe, and how that’s changed over  the past 10 billion years. Back in November of 2023, the team released  the first batch of images to the public. But they were mostly just proof  that the telescope was working.

The first big data drop didn’t  happen until May of 2024. And in addition to ten scientific papers, it included five spectacular images  that helped produce those papers. And we’ll be showing you two of them.

The first is this stunner:  the stellar nursery M78. Yep, you’re looking at light being  made by a bunch of baby stars! While you might be fond of the swirly  shape, or that complementary color combo, astronomers love this image because it reveals  brand new details of a previously studied region.

That’s because Euclid doesn’t just  have equipment with higher resolution. It can see both visible and infrared light!  And this image is a combination of both! Unlike visible light, infrared  passes through interstellar dust.

So the team used this image to discover more  than 300,000 new objects…including planets! And see that bright purple area in the middle? That shows astronomers where a bunch  of baby stars have just formed, and have started spitting  out a bunch of radiation.

By studying these patterns and getting a  better sense of how many stars and planets are getting made in this astronomical nursery, scientists can gain a better understanding  of how stars and solar systems form. Meanwhile, our second Euclid  picture shows off a whole galaxy. While it officially goes  by several different names, we’ll stick to the one the  Euclid team prefers: NGC 6744.

At first glance, you might be wondering why  this image of a galaxy is any different from the gajillion other images that  astronomers have released over the decades. What, exactly, is Euclid  bringing to the table here? Well, this new space telescope has the  unique ability to take images with both a wide-field view and high resolution.

That gives astronomers an  unprecedented, holistic view of something that’s as large as a  galaxy…as well as the area around it. Normally, to get this kind of shot, astronomers  have to take a bunch of separate snapshots and then use software to stitch them together. But Euclid captured this all  at once in just about an hour.

The spiral arms make this galaxy really  beautiful, and astronomers know these spirals are key to a galaxy forming new stars because  they clump matter together as they swirl. But it’s still a mystery how spiral  arms jumpstart that star formation. Images like this one, courtesy  of Euclid, could help us solve that mystery by showing  that process in action.

Oh, and as a little bonus, if you look at the top  right of the galaxy, you’ll see a little smudge. That’s actually a dwarf satellite  galaxy, which hadn’t been seen before! Because just like M78, Euclid wasn’t the  first telescope to look at this galaxy.

Hubble snapped a pic back in 2018. And when you compare them side-by-side,  you can really see how much space telescope technology has advanced  since Hubble’s launch way back in 1990! Speaking of Hubble, you may have heard  earlier this year that it’s on its last legs.

After six months of technical difficulties,  NASA decided that the telescope would have to operate with just one gyroscope  to keep it pointing where it needs to. But it is still alive and kicking,  giving us pictures like this one! Ok this one is kind of a cheat,  because it’s actually a composite of more than 500 images that Hubble  captured over the last twenty years.

This particular ball of space confetti  is the globular cluster Omega Centauri. There are about 10 million stars packed into a  sphere that’s only about 150 light years across! But thanks to this image, scientists  are convinced there’s a black hole hiding in the middle that’s about  8,000 times more massive than the Sun.

That’s pretty cool when you normally  associate big black holes with the centers of whole galaxies, and  not much dinkier star clusters. But it’s also cool because that number makes  this particular black hole super special. It’s the first solid evidence of  an intermediate mass black hole.

See, astronomers have three  traditional categories for black holes: you’ve got supermassive black holes  like one at the center of our galaxy; you’ve got stellar mass black holes  which form right after a star explodes; and you’ve got the ones in-between. And for decades, we only had real-world  examples of the two extremes. Intermediate black holes were even  more invisible than middle children.

But thanks to 500 images and two  decades to capture those images, and a level of patience I cannot  comprehend, this team of researchers was able to find Omega Centauri’s black hole by  tracing the motion of the stars around it. In other words, they were looking  for an invisible black hole by looking at the visible things  its extreme gravity could mess with. And that’s not actually a new  technique at all, or unique to Hubble.

Tracking stellar motion is how  astronomers helped to prove there’s a much much bigger black  hole at the center of the Milky Way. Which leads us neatly into our next image. Back in 2022, astronomers released the  very first image of Sagittarius A*.

Or as we like to call it,  the forbidden space donut. Because you still can’t see the actual black hole. It’s hiding inside that central shadow.

It’s the matter swirling around the black  hole that’s emitting a bunch of radio waves, and astronomers then translated that  invisible light into actual colors. But this year, the team provided  an even cooler-looking update. This new image incorporates information  about how the light is polarized.

In other words, they wanted  to know how the light rays are actually oriented when they reach Earth. There are a lot of different ways light can end  up polarized, so with a new detailed visual map, they can pin down what’s  really happening at the spot where all that swirling matter  finally gets gobbled up. So with all those cool new  features, maybe instead of a donut, we could call this one…the forbidden space nest.

But if it’s a nest, then I can jump right  into our next image, which features a bird! Do you see a penguin and its egg in  this James Webb Space Telescope image? This shows two galaxies in the  middle of one of astronomy’s more violent events: a galactic merger.

The penguin used to be a nice  spiral galaxy like the Milky Way, but thanks to interactions with its egg-like  neighbor, here, it’s gotten a bit pulled apart. Images like this give astronomers a glimpse  of what’s in our own galaxy’s future. Because about 4 billion years from now, we’re due to collide with our  larger neighbor Andromeda.

I sure hope that we get turned into  a fun shape for aliens to admire. We’re sticking with JWST for our next image, but shrinking down from intergalactic scales  to a single solar system inside the Milky Way. Or should I say, a future solar system, because that bright white dot in the  center isn’t even technically a star yet.

It’s what astronomers call a protostar, and  it appears to be just 100,000 years old! If you look really close, you can also  see a dark band right in the middle there. This is the protoplanetary  disk, which is currently feeding the protostar the gas that it  needs to turn into a proper star.

And as the name suggests, that’s where  any future planets will form, too! Meanwhile, we’ve also got this spectacular  pair of cones filled with gas and dust. Astronomers call them outflows, and they’re  made by the protostar’s magnetic field.

But they’re not just there to look pretty. Over the years, astronomers have  learned that outflows like these can help slow matter in the  spinning protoplanetary disk. And as that matter slows down, it can keep  falling onto and feeding the protostar.

But one outstanding mystery is  exactly how these outflows form. So thanks to new-fangled telescopes  like JWST, astronomers will be able to compare different young stars and solar  systems to see exactly what’s going on. But that’s enough pretty space  pictures from beyond our solar system.

Let’s check out some objects  that are closer to home. You might look at this image  and think I’m showing you a weird alien spaceship from some  franchise you’ve never heard of. Or you might think it’s a very cool asteroid.

And in that case, you’re not wrong. But it’s merely a piece of an asteroid,  which is in a research lab on Earth! This is a tiny bit of Bennu, the rubble pile  asteroid visited by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx probe.

It’s just over a millimeter wide, and it’s  chock full of magnesium, sodium, and phosphates. But in the places where those ingredients are  arranged into a particular crystal structure, you get these super reflective baby blue patches. By discovering phosphates in samples like  these, scientists have evidence that suggests Bennu was created from bits of what one researcher called a “long-gone, tiny, primitive ocean world” And speaking of tiny, primitive worlds… Mercury is the smallest planet in our solar  system, and it’s surprisingly hard to get to.

Which is why images of it,  even in 2024, look like this. Thanks to the Sun’s gravity, traveling to a body  inside Earth’s orbit is like going downhill. Unless you want your spacecraft to  whip past your target before getting up-close-and-personal with the Sun, you  have to find a way to slow it down a lot.

That’s exactly what the joint European-Japanese  mission BepiColombo is doing right now. It launched back in 2018, but it isn’t scheduled  to settle into an orbit around Mercury until 2027! And to shed its crazy excess energy,  BepiColombo has to use the Earth, Venus, and Mercury as celestial brakes,  flying past them over and over again.

This year, BepiColombo made its  closest ever flyby of Mercury. Thanks to some of the images it snapped,  scientists were able to discover new craters… like this one they named Stoddart, after a  nineteenth century painter from New Zealand. In time, a closer look at Stoddart could help  astronomers solve some of the mysteries of why Mercury’s surface looks the way it does.

But this was really just a preview of the amazing Mercury science that will come  once BepiColombo is in orbit. Again, that won’t happen for several years. But since there have only been two  other missions to Mercury so far… and one of them was just a  flyby… We’ll take what I can get!

You know what’s also years in the making? A total solar eclipse, like the one that  crossed a large chunk of North America in April of this year, and  won’t do that again until 2045. But hey Reykjavík, you can  keep August 12th, 2026 free!

There are some amazing images of this special  event from Earth, as well as from space. But there were also lots of opportunistic  researchers who used this rare mid-day darkness to take pictures that would help them learn about  the Sun’s corona and the Earth’s atmosphere. Pictures like this one, which was taken as  part of a citizen science research project!

To learn more about the Sun’s  corona…the part that’s basically only visible during a total  solar eclipse…researchers   gave telescopes to 35 volunteer teams stationed in different cities  along the eclipse path, and asked them to measure  how the light was polarized. And by combining their videos together,  researchers got a full hour of footage that would have been impossible  to get from Earth otherwise! But just one month later, our Sun  had its strongest storm in decades.

And while that led to some  gorgeous astrophotography   of the auroras in Earth’s atmosphere, astronomers were more concerned with  capturing what was happening at the source. Pictures of the Sun always look a bit turbulent,  but we’re focusing here on the big flash here. That was a solar flare.

And the radiation and charged  particles it released meant that, a few days later, people across the  Northern hemisphere were treated to some of the strongest aurorae ever recorded,  which could be seen as far south as Florida! Scientists have a whopping nineteen active  space missions focused on Sun science, so they were able to study this  event in unprecedented detail. And that’s important, because  solar storms can affect the satellites we rely on  to navigate and communicate.

Together, all of these missions  will make us better at spotting, understanding, and eventually  hopefully predicting space weather. So from auroras and eclipses, to new  space telescopes and old friends, 2024 has been an amazing year for astronomy. Did we miss a space picture from  this year that really blew your mind?

Let us know in the comments below. [♪ OUTRO]