NASA鈥檚 James Webb Space Telescope has now been focusing its powerful eye on space for more than two years, and it marked this anniversary with a picture of two galaxies, called Arp 142, or the Penguin and the Egg (the bright light to the left of the penguin), which are fighting a drawn-out cosmic battle.
The above image, which was captured using a combination of near and mid-infrared light, shows the galaxies in the midst of a merger, with a misty blue haze of colliding stars and gas. Hundreds of millions of years from now, the two galaxies will finally merge. The similarity to a penguin is just happy happenstance.
On 8 April, a total solar eclipse swept across North America and had millions of people donning protective glasses and craning their necks to look up at the sky. But we had eyes looking down on Earth, too, in the form of satellites orbiting 36,000 kilometres above the planet. The European Space Agency鈥檚 Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite captured this image of Earth with the moon鈥檚 dark shadow passing over North America.
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This year saw multiple test flights of the most powerful rocket yet made, SpaceX鈥檚 Starship. The rocket, which SpaceX boss Elon Musk hopes will eventually take humans to Mars, had increasing success in each test, culminating in a landing back on Earth, using a pair of giant robotic chopsticks to catch the returning rocket. Here, it can be seen taking off from its launch pad in Texas in March, called the Gateway to Mars by SpaceX.
NASA analysed pieces of an alien world this year, in the form of rocks from the asteroid Bennu taken using its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. A capsule carrying about 250 grams of the rock landed near Salt Lake City, Utah, in September 2023, and the capsule was fully opened in January 2024. Its contents have been pored over by scientists who hope to find clues about how the solar system formed. Already, the sample has begun to yield answers, with researchers finding the rocks are packed with carbon and water, key ingredients for life.
We have been treated to many stunning auroras this year, but there are few views more spectacular than the ones from space. This image was taken by US astronaut Matthew Dominick as he peered out the window of the Dragon capsule to check the testing of the Boeing Starliner spacecraft, and serendipitously captured the aurora seen here.
The European Space Agency鈥檚 BepiColombo mission completed its fourth flyby of Mercury this year, as part of its mission to enter orbit around that planet in late 2026. In September, we saw images of its mottled surface captured by BepiColombo鈥檚 monitoring cameras just 165 kilometres above the scorched planet. These images were taken from the planet鈥檚 nightside.
SpaceX conducted the first ever civilian spacewalk in September, allowing two of its crew of four to partially exit their Crew Dragon spacecraft, popping their heads out into the freezing atmosphere of 740 kilometres altitude. The billionaire co-funder of SpaceX鈥檚 Polaris programme, Jared Isaacman, made the first spacewalk, looking down at Earth and remarking: 鈥淔rom here it sure looks like a perfect world.鈥�
The Perseid meteor shower, an annual display that occurs as Earth sweeps through the tail of comet Swift-Tuttle, happened this year during a moon-free period in August, which helped astronomers capture some particularly stunning pictures. This photo showing the skies above Stonehenge, taken by astrophotographer Josh Dury, was made by merging many different meteor photos, and a long-exposure shot of the Milky Way, into one. All of the meteor paths can be traced back to a single point in the sky, near the constellation of Perseus.
