And here: The 15 most beautiful space photos of 2023

Another year is coming to an end, and once again the look back offers little to be happy about. Fortunately, there is a – hopefully reassuring – view of the infinite expanse of space, which makes Earth, its inhabitants and their problems suddenly seem very small. Which is not meant as a call to escapism: the small sphere we live on is our only home in this incredibly vast and beautiful universe; we have to take care of her.

This small selection of space images from 2023 – most from the James Webb Space Telescope – are, as always, completely random. So if you have a nice space photo that would fit well in this series, please post it in the comments.

The James Webb Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) shows a highly unusual view Saturn: The planet itself appears extremely dark at this wavelength because the methane gas absorbs almost all the sunlight hitting its atmosphere. However, the icy rings remain relatively bright and three of Saturn’s moons can also be seen: Dione, Enceladus and Tethys.

In this image from the Hubble telescope we see NGC 4654, an intermediate barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo. The galaxy is called ‘intermediate’ because it has characteristics of both barred and non-barred spiral galaxies. NGC 4654 has a diameter of about 70,000 light-years and is estimated to be 45 million light-years from the Milky Way.

This image – composed of X-ray images from the Chandra X-ray Observatory (purple) and infrared data from the James Webb Telescope (red, green, blue) – shows the most distant black hole ever discovered in X-ray light. The astronomers found it in a galaxy called UHZ1 towards the galaxy cluster Abell 2744, which is 3.5 billion light-years away from Earth. However, UHZ1 is much further away than the cluster, at 13.2 billion light years; the light we collect now traveled only 470 million years after the Big Bang.

This image comes from the James Webb Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-InfraRed Camera) and shows its lower part Herbig-Haro object 797 (HH797) in the northern constellation Perseus. Herbig-Haro objects are small, bright nebulae that surround protostars. They form when stellar winds or gas jets from these newborn stars form shock waves that strike surrounding gas and dust structures at high speeds. These objects were first observed in the 19th century by American astronomer Sherburne Wesley Burnham, but were not recognized as a distinct type of emission nebula until the 1940s. The infrared-bright objects in the upper part of the image likely contain two more protostars.

For once not a view into space, but from space – from the International Space Station (ISS) – to our planet: they stretch like a chain Lights of the cities about the US. At the top left you can see the lights of Chicago surrounding Lake Michigan. On the far right, the greater Dallas/Fort Worth area shines through the clouds, while above the first rays of sunlight illuminate Earth’s atmosphere.

The Crab Nebulacataloged as M1 And NGC 1952, consists of the remains of an exploded star, whose supernova was observed on Earth in 1054. The nebula has already been studied in detail by several observatories and also by the Hubble Space Telescope, but the infrared resolution of the James Webb telescope provides new clues about its structure and origin.

This image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the Jupiter in a new perspective: a color composite of ultraviolet wavelengths. The famous huge storm known as the “Big Red Spot” is clearly visible. It appears red to the human eye, but appears blue and darker in this ultraviolet image because haze particles at high altitudes absorb light at these wavelengths.

The barred spiral galaxy M83Also “Southern Pinwheel System” called and like NGC 5236 cataloged, is located approximately 17 million light-years from Earth. This James Webb telescope image was taken with the Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI) in the mid-infrared, which is very different from the optical wavelengths. The bright blue shows the distribution of stars in the central part of the Milky Way. The bright yellow areas that weave through the spiral arms are areas of active stellar nurseries, areas where new stars are being formed. The orange-red areas indicate the distribution of a specific type of carbon compounds.

The famous Ring Nebula (also under the names M57 And NGC 6720 known) is relatively close to Earth at a distance of about 2500 light years. They are the remains of a star that shed its outer gas shell about 20,000 years ago and is now a white dwarf star at the center of the nebula. New infrared images from the James Webb Telescope provide unprecedented spatial resolution and reveal unique details. The image on the left, taken by the NIRCam (Near-InfraRed Camera), shows the intricate details of the inner ring’s filament structure, while the image on the right, taken by the MIRI (Mid-InfraRed Instrument), shows extraordinary details . details in the concentric features in the revealed outer regions.

The high resolution of the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) on the Hawaiian island of Maui allows objects as small as 20 kilometers to be seen on the surface Sun visible. New images taken with the Visible Broadband Imager (VBI) sensor show not only relatively quiet parts of the Sun, but also turbulent sunspots in unprecedented detail. The dark spots – cooler areas on the Sun’s surface associated with the activity of the solar cycle – are often larger than the Earth’s surface.

In the colossal Pinwheel system (also known as M101, NGC 5457 or Pinwheel system), astronomers discovered a supernova – the explosion of a massive star – in May. The point of light, which is located about 21 million light years away, can currently also be seen with a small telescope. However, this image comes from the Gemini North Telescope, located on Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii. This powerful telescope shows the supernova named “SN 2023ixf” as a brilliant bluish point of light on the far left of one of the galaxy’s spiral arms.

Here we see a closely linked pair of actively forming stars, captured in high-resolution near-infrared light by the James Webb Telescope’s NIRCam. These are protostars Herbig-Haro object 46/47 (HH 46/47) – an important object to observe as it is only a few thousand years old. It takes millions of years for stars to fully develop, so such objects can provide insight into how stars increase in mass over time. The two stars can be seen in the center of the red diffraction peaks; they appear as an orange-white spot. They are surrounded by a disk of gas and dust, which still contributes to their mass. The orange lobes on both sides are formed by previous ejections from the stars. Over millions of years, the stars in Herbig-Haro 46/47 will completely shape and brighten the scene.

This image of the cluster of galaxies MACS0416 was created by combining infrared observations from the James Webb Telescope with visible light data from the Hubble Telescope. For the image, the shortest wavelengths of light were generally colored blue, the longest wavelengths colored red, and the middle wavelengths colored green. The colors provide information about the distance of the galaxies: the bluest galaxies are relatively close, while the redder galaxies tend to be further away or contain large amounts of dust.

This ethereal structure is the star-forming region NGC 346, a so-called open star cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The mid-infrared light image comes from the James Webb Telescope’s Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI). The blue tendrils represent silicates and sooty chemical molecules, while the red glow represents warm dust heated by the brightest and most massive stars in the heart of the region.

Omega Centauri (Also ω Centauri or NGC 5139) is a globular star cluster in the constellation Centaur. With about ten million stars, it is by far the most massive globular cluster in the Milky Way. Globular clusters are among the oldest objects in our universe; their stars are more than 12 billion years old. However, Omega Centauri goes too far: this miniature galaxy contains several populations of stars of different ages and also with different levels of metals or elements heavier than boron. This suggests that Omega Centauri has a different origin than other globular clusters. It could be the core of a dwarf galaxy that was torn apart long ago and absorbed by our Milky Way. The image combines infrared observations from the Spitzer Space Telescope with visible-light data from the 4-meter Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.