Seeing heaven in your viewfinder

1 What on Earth is a Magnetar?

It’s not on Earth; it’s in space. The little purple dot right in the centre is a dense star with the most powerful magnetic field in the universe. How magnetic? About 100 million times stronger than the most powerful magnets made by humans. We only know of 31 of these, and discovered this Magnetar, known as J1818.0-1607, last year. It’s 500 years old, so probably among the youngest out there. It pulses bright and spins furiously, about 21,000 light years away. Scientists combined X-rays from the Chandra satellite telescope and infrared data from other observatories to create this composite, the first highresolution image of J18, released on January 8, 2021.

2 All the space you need

In many ways, this is the image that started it all. In January 2015, NASA released to the public its highest-quality picture, an image of our neighbouring spiral galaxy, Andromeda, 2.5 million light years away. It is massive, made up of 1.5 billion pixels. To view it without zooming out, you’d need 600 HD TV screens.

The composite draws on photographs taken by the Hubble Telescope over three years, from more than 411 points. Andromeda, because it’s so close, has been helping scientists make precision studies and extrapolate on other large spiral galaxies.

There are 100 million stars in this image, any one of which could harbour planets that support life.

3 See a star as it explodes and dies

The elements that make up life on Earth come from inside the furnaces of stars and the explosions that mark their deaths. Which is why researchers are so interested in Cassiopeia A, the debris of a starburst 11,000 light years away, which possibly exploded in 1680. A supernova is millions of degrees hot, its glow needs X-ray vision. Thankfully, NASA’S Chandra X-ray space observatory can do the job. Chandra made 16 pointings at Cas A between 2000 and 2010. In 2017 it released this image capturing silicon (red), sulphur (yellow), calcium (green) and iron (purple). The blue veins show high-energy X-ray emission. That blue outer ring is a blast wave. How’s that for spectacle?

4 One of our own

Finally, beautiful images of space from an Indian programme. When ISRO launched its Mars Orbiter Mission in 2013, only the Soviet Union, the United States and the European Space Agency had sent voyagers to Mars – none had succeeded on their first attempt. But in 2014, our spacecraft entered the Red Planet’s orbit. On board, the Mars Colour Camera went to work immediately, beaming back these gorgeous shots in its first year. The orbiter has set back some 1,000 images since, enough for ISRO to fill an atlas. We’ve had rare glimpses of Mars’s clouds and dust; the dark side of its moon, Deimos; and in July 2020, its other moon Phobos. Not bad for a mission that was expected to last only six months.

5 Black hole donuts

Black holes are not things, but places; collapsed stars or star groups with such strong gravity that they suck in everything around, including light. Albert Einstein theorised on their existence in 1916, astronomers only identified one in 1971. Then, in 2017, came visuals. The Event Horizon Telescope network observed something unusual in the centre of the galaxy Messier87, 55 million light years away. It looked like a bright ring, a shape that could only be formed when light itself was being bent by a black hole. It’s huge – 6.5 billion times bigger than our sun. The telescope will next observe a dark corner of our own galaxy, long said to hold a black hole too. Who knows what we’ll see?

6 By Jove, he’s stormy!

We’ve been looking at Jupiter since at least the 7th century BCE. By 1610 CE, Galileo had used a telescope to discover four of its largest moons; we’ve since counted 79. Then sharper telescopes spotted the storm larger than Earth that forms its Great Red Spot. We’ve been flying past and sneaking peeks since 1973, but it’s only in August 2020 that the Hubble Space Telescope offered this detailed look at its atmosphere. The weather report: A new storm brewing under the Great Red Spot. The new image also features the moon Europa. There’ll be better views soon. The European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer launches in 2022, and NASA’S Europa Clipper mission will follow two years later.

7 A mouthful of sky

With the human eye, you’ll see, at best, only half the sky, a hemisphere oriented to where you’re standing. But in December 2020, scientists compiled data from more than 1.8 billion stars to plot a 360-degree-view map of the sky. That’s 100 million sources more than their April 2018 data release, which contained a staggering 1.7 billion stars.

The European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite drew on the colour and brightness of stars it has observed since 2013. It’s a lot to take in at once. Bright areas indicate dense star clusters, dark patches occur where the stars are fewer and fainter. The bright strip is our Milky Way. We’re somewhere in there.

8 Star trails not too far from home

What are we looking at? Earth, in fast forward. NASA astronaut Christina Koch, on board the International Space Station, took over 200 photos in a span of six minutes in October 2019, as the ISS travelled over Namibia towards the Red Sea.

This resulting time-lapse composite features both natural and artificial lights. See the thin tread marks? The yellow-and-white dotted streaks are city lights. The dark orange strips are from fires in Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. White splotches represent lightning storms as they blaze. And the arcs are from stars in space, with a few travelling satellites thrown in.

9 Who knew our sun was a moving mosaic?

The Daniel K Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, the world’s most powerful tool for observing the sun, started sending out test images only in January 2020. This is its best work, the highest-resolution image ever taken of the Sun from Earth. Those yellow bits (each as vast as the Indo-gangetic plain), are hot plasma cells turbulently rising from inside the star. The dark borders indicate where plasma is cooling and sinking. The original image, if you printed it, would cover an area of 36,500 sq km – you could literally look at it for days. The telescope will try to work out a long-held solar mystery: why the sun’s outer layer, is hotter than its visible surface.

10 A swirly side of Mars

This image was acquired a week before Christmas 2020. It looked like the red planet was getting into the festive mood too. The European Space Agency’s Mars Express probe used a high-resolution stereo camera to capture what looks like a haloed angel sinking into cappuccino foam at Mars’s watery south pole. That halo? Probably caused by a crater. Notice the heart on her side? It’s a dark mineral field. On Mars, dusty cyclones can tower 10 km high, causing landforms we’d never see on Earth. Mars Express has been orbiting our neighbour since 2003, taking pictures and readings to help us understand its geography better.