Cosmos’ favourite space images for 2023

We <3 space.

Especially when images are highlighted in vibrant colours, there’s almost nothing better. So, to round out the year, we’ve compiled our favourite space images for you to wow your friends and family this Christmas season.

Stunning ultraviolet images of Mars

In July, NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) mission took an ultraviolet image of Mars, highlighting atmospheric ozone in purple, clouds and hazes in white or blue, and the surface as tan or green.

The image is of Mars’ northern hemisphere and was taken in January 2023 after Mars had passed the farthest point in its orbit from the Sun.

JWST Milky Way heart

Of course, we needed to include the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

In just one year it has revolutionised astronomy, despite its eye-watering price tag.

The Milky Way image shows the area – Sagittarius C – which is just 300 light years away from the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.

The pink area surrounded by blue on the left of the image is a cluster of protostars – stars which are still forming. Surrounding it in blue is ionised hydrogen, and the large darker section above is an infrared dark cloud.

Rare supernova remnants

But not all great images come from Webb. An incredible image from January combined data from the Parkes radio telescope, Murriyang and the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) to give scientists the most detailed radio image yet of our galaxy.

The image highlights hydrogen gas– likely from 20 possible supernova remnants (SNRs) or new stellar nurseries – in the galactic plane, and the team is hoping it will shed much more information on why SNRs seem to be so rare.

Neutrino ‘image’ of the Milky Way

Deep under the ice at the South Pole sits a telescope which captures neither light nor radio waves, but ghost particles.

In July, the telescope – called the IceCube Neutrino Observatory – analysed 10 years of data using new machine learning techniques and found evidence of neutrino emissions from the Milky Way. They then used this data to create the first neutrino ‘image’ of our Milky Way from the findings.

It doesn’t really look like the other images, but being able to image the galaxy just from a particle that has almost no mass, incredibly hard to capture and rarely interacts with matter is pretty incredible.

A black hole producing a jet

Finally, last but not least is a black hole, with it’s fabulous purple cape.

The image shows the shadow of the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Messier 87 galaxy which is creating a powerful jet stream.

Published in April, this was the first time that the black hole and the jet had been able to be imaged together.

The team did this by mostly using the Global Millimetre VLBI Array (GMVA), as well as the phased Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array, and the Greenland Telescope to analyse the black hole in the 3.5 mm radio wavelength.