The 100 Best Science Photos of 2019

running man nebula — (Image credit: Steven Mohr)

Science can be beautiful, and gross, and surprising, and awe-inspiring. From stoic primates and graceful sea creatures, to cosmic cannibals and black hole jets, to bloody waterfalls and sparkling glaciers, this year was full of visual treasures in the science realm. Here are 100 of our favorite science photos of 2019.

World river maps

The super blood wolf moon lunar eclipse graced the skies late-night on Jan. 20, 2019, as our lone satellite began its trek into Earth's outer shadow or penumbra. The pinnacle of the show, the total eclipse, happened between 11:41 p.m. and 12:43 p.m. EST (8:41 p.m. and 9:43 p.m. PST), when Earth's umbra had entirely engulfed the moon. Here, Marcel Kusch captures this image in Duisburg, Germany, showing the super blood moon eclipse above an industrial plant.

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At the end of January, scientists at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa (UH) created a map that they hailed the biggest release of astronomical data of all time. By compiling data from four years of observations by the Pan-STARRS observatory in Maui, the researchers created a mosaic of the Milky Way (red smear in the middle) and its cosmic neighborhood. The map showed more than 800 million stars, galaxies and roving interstellar objects.

Glittering galaxy? Nope, just a sparkly image of a fruit fly's sex organs. Biologist Ben Walsh, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Evolution, Ecology and Behaviour at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom captured the glorious image. He stained the testes of a dissected fruit fly with fluorescent dye and then captured the result through a microscope using the camera on his iPhone.

An elephant matriarch in Kenya named F_MU1 died of old age this year, after spending some 60 years living in the Tsavo region. And she was an impressive sight to the very end. Known as a big tusker, this African elephant sported tusks long enough to brush the ground. Fortunately, photographer Will Burrard-Lucas captured stunning images of the stately pachyderm in the weeks prior to her death. Burrard-Lucas nicknamed F_MU1 "Queen of the Elephants."

Sometimes gross is also "amazing," as in this inside-out toad! Jan Freedman, curator of natural history at The Box museum in Plymouth told Live Science that he was walking with his family at a reservoir when his 8-year-old son spotted the gory corpse. You can see the toad's translucent intestines spilling out, while the peeled skin of its underside, which is still attached below the jaw, stretches over the toad's back.

This year, Natalia Rossi, the manager of the Cuba Program for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), wrote about her amazing work as a crocodile specialist and the difficulty of being in such a male-dominated field. "When you jump into muddy waters full of crocodiles and all male eyes are on you, and you feel the silent wonder: Is she going to make it?," Rossi said. Here, an image she snapped of a baby American crocodile (Crocodylus acutus) as it hatches from its shell in Cuba.

This spring, an image of a monkey in a Finland Zoo got quite a bit of attention on social media for her particularly buff body. In the image, a female white-faced saki monkey (Pithecia pithecia) named Bea crouches on a branch in her enclosure at the Helsinki Zoo. Her arms, chest and legs looked exceedingly bulky relative to her small face. Turned out, she was not a furry bodybuilder, but rather had the ability to puff up her fur.

Images released this year highlighted the transformation of the planet's surface as a result of climate change. At the point when the Arctic's sea ice was supposed to reach its maximum thickness, scientists found that it was almost gone across the Bering Sea. In early April, the sea was almost entirely free of ice, scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) pointed out. The image shows the iced-over Bering Sea this time of year in 2014 (left), and what it looked like on March 31, 2019 (right).

Scientists using high-speed video revealed a horror scene beneath the water's surface: the gruesome and deadly attacks carried out by glassworms — one of the fastest seen in animals. In the videos, you can see multiple-jointed mouthparts extending from the heads of these teensy creatures extended; Inside those mouthparts are branching structures that catch and hold squirming prey — even when the prey sprouted "teeth" from its neck.

In a study out this year, researchers equipped with computer models looked at climate changes during the Quaternary period, which started around 2.59 million years ago and continues into today. They found that Earth has not undergone any such changes as rapid as those seen today. During the Quaternary, glaciers would have crept down from Greenland (shown here) to cover much of North America and northern Europe.

This image is "amazing" not so much because it's a "looker," but for the sheer scientific prowess that went into capturing it. In April, an international team of scientists released the first-ever close-up picture of a black hole (or, more technically, its shadow). The black hole called M87 lurks at the center of the Virgo A galaxy. The team spent 2 years trying to zoom in on M87's singularity. This image shows the contours of the black hole's event horizon, the point beyond which no light or matter can escape.

Balloon-y! A bizarre creature that looks a bit like a balloon on a string turned up this spring during a dive to the Java Trench in the Indian Ocean. "We were just watching the video back and saw the thing come out of the darkness," said Alan Jamieson, the chief scientist on the expedition and a senior lecturer at Newcastle University in the U.K. "It drifted right towards the camera... and then drifted off again." Jamieson thinks the gelatinous creature may be a new species of ascidian (also called a sea squirt).

This spring, Florida-resident Marvin Hajos died after being attacked by one of his cassowaries — a giant, flightless bird native to Australia and Southeast Asia. Rescue workers reportedly found Hajos lying dead between two cassowary pens, perhaps having been attacked by a female protecting her eggs, the medical examiner said at the time. While the mug shot here does not show one of Hajos’ killers, it is the same type of bird. In fact, at the owner’s pre-mortem behest, the cassowary was put up for auction, along with about 100 other exotic animals on his estate.

A powerful magnetic explosion erupted from a tiny star, astronomers reported this year. While stars do have tantrums of this sort from time to time, what caught scientists’ eyes was the fact that this star — residing some 250 light-years from us — is the coolest and smallest star known to emit such a rare white-light superflare. This type of superlare describes a sudden eruption of magnetic energy that unleashes huge quantities of radiation. Here, an illustration of this mega eruption.

This glamour shot of the Daedalus Crater on the far side of the moon made its way online this year (it was captured during the Apollo 11 mission) to illustrate that the moon is, indeed, all it’s cracked up to be … and more. A new analysis of our moon’s surface revealed it is far more fractured than anyone thought. The researchers found that cracks from asteroid impacts extend to depths of 12 miles (20 kilometers). Using computer simulations, the team found that a single asteroid impact could fragment the lunar crust into blocks about 3 feet (1 meter) wide, opening surface cracks that extend for hundreds of kilometers.

An illustration of seeming “flower petal” milk ducts went viral this year on Twitter. But alas, the image is not an accurate portrayal of a woman’s mammary glands. The most glaring error in the image, which was created with an iPad app called Anatomy & Physiology, is that it shows skeletal muscles; a woman’s breasts don’t contain skeletal muscles, though some parts have circular or smooth muscle in place.

The triangle weaver spider (Hyptiotes cavatus) is now the only known creature, besides humans, to employ a catapulting strategy known as "external power amplification, a new study out this year found. Once prey lands in this spider’s web, the arachnid releases silk at its back leg, which is the rear anchor line; then it (and the web line) shoots forward with alarming speed to ensnare its next meal. [The web catapult is pretty intricate and wild if you want to read more about it.]

A great white shark thought to have entered Long Island Sound (a potential first for great whites) may not have been there at all, Live Science reported in May. OCEARCH scientists had outfitted the great white shark dubbed Cabot with a tracking device in 2018 off Nova Scotia. Then this spring, the 9-foot-8-inch-long (nearly 3 meters) male shark’s dorsal fin tag pinged a location that appeared to be off the coast of Greenwich, Connecticut. However, a day later the ping showed the shark was far outside the Sound.

They may be wee — just 6 inches (15 centimeters) long — but dragonfish are fearsome, at least for the teensy sea life they call prey: The fish sports “massive” jaws lined with nearly transparent, razor-sharp teeth. Scientists this year figured out how the glow from the fish’s body doesn’t light up its clear teeth to tip off potential meals. When they looked at the chompers under an electron microscope, the researchers found an array of grain-size nanocrystals speckled across each fang's enamel; those specks keep light from reflecting off its open jaws.

AAAHHH, a pudgy, wriggling tardigrade. Does it get any better? Yep, the little guy is shimmying around under a microscope with something weird in its belly. Biologist Rafael Martín-Ledo used phase contrast microscopy to capture the most minute details of this water bear, including its stylets — a pair of food-piercing structures flanking its mouth — as well as a treasure inside its belly — chunks of a strange crystal. What is it?

Animal cuteness abounded this year. Take this piglet squid. Marine scientists released a stunning video in July showing the cephalopod — tentacles donning its head — floating along in the central Pacific Ocean near Palmyra Atoll. The amazement of the scientists who spotted the creature while aboard the exploration vehicle (E/V) Nautilus could be heard on video: "What are you?" one of the voices in the video asked about the sweet-looking creature. "Is that a squid? I think it's a squid. It's like a bloated squid with tiny tentacles and a little hat that's waving around. And it looks like it's got a massive, inflated mantle cavity. I've never seen anything quite like this before."

Photographer Rainee Colacurcio captured a gorgeous image of the International Space Station as it flew across the spotless sun. The ISS orbits our home planet every 90 minutes or so, and one can spot the huge ship at night as a white dot cruising through the sky. But snagging such an image during the daytime took some technical know-how. "My go-to setup is a dedicated hydrogen-alpha solar scope," which is a special telescope for observing the sun, Colacurcio told Live Science in an email.

A “baby pic” of the Milky Way showed off our galaxy’s humble origins, before the cosmic monster cannibalized another, smaller galaxy about 10 billion years ago. In a new study out in 2019 (the one that resulted in the glorious baby shot), researchers identified two flavors of stars in the Milky Way: a "red" group of stars containing a higher concentration of metals, and a "blue" group that was not metal rich and once belonged to that smaller, cannibalized galaxy called Gaia-Enceladus.

As if a miniature Iron Throne, a certain snail that lives near hydrothermal vents in the deep sea builds its own metallic armor. This scaly-foot snail (Chrysomallon squamiferum), which is also known as the sea pangolin, may look tough but not tough enough to defend against extinction. On July 18, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) listed the snail as endangered, making it the first animal species given that status due to the threats of deep-sea mining.

NASA’s Earth Observatory shared a haunting image this year showing the blazing heart of a fire cloud hovering above Earth. The magnificent image was snapped on Aug. 8 in eastern Washington state. Though surreal-looking, these fire clouds — also called pyrocumulonimbus or PyroCb clouds — can be quite disruptive, as they act like chimneys to funnel smoke and particles from wildfires into the lower stratosphere.

The research vessel Polarstern is one of the world’s most indestructible ships, and this year it departed from Norway en route to the Arctic Ocean where it was tasked with the lofty goal of figuring out how climate change is reshaping the Arctic. The expedition about this icebreaker relied on hundreds of scientists from 17 countries who planned to study the ice, oceans and atmosphere during the mission.

Who knew a bout of bad gas could look so pretty? Turns out, a few million years ago, a cloud of matter and electromagnetic energy erupted near our galaxy’s central black hole. The resulting speedy electrons then tore into clumps of dust and gas nearby, causing them to balloon … and balloon. These gigantic bubbles of invisible energy are still there today, each one towering some 25,000 light-years high (about a quarter of the width of the Milky Way itself). Though astronomers aren’t sure how and when this galactic bubble-blowing blast occurred, this year they reported some fresh clues after looking at the huge bubbles in the radio part of the spectrum.

A purple sunrise above Lake Isabelle, Indian Peaks Wilderness, Colorado.

The eruption of the Russian volcano Raikoke in June painted sunrises and sunsets the world over in a purple hue. Here’s how: The eruption spewed sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, leading to tiny particles called aerosols. These aerosols scatter sunlight, generating more purples at sunrise and sunset. The image above shows one such purple sunrise above Lake Isabelle in Indian Peaks Wilderness, Colorado.

Deep-sea scientists aboard the research vessel Nautilus in September were quite perplexed and amazed when their underwater recon robot encountered a limp, limbless creature floating over the seafloor in the Pacific Ocean. Right in front of their eyes, the bell-shaped blob suddenly transformed; it ballooned into a long, translucent windsock with a red splotch on its innards. That shapeshifting blob was one of the world’s rarest-seen and least-studied jellyfish: Deepstaria (named for the research vessel that first discovered the genus in the 1960s).

The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of RS Puppis, one of the brightest Cepheid stars visible in our galaxy. The star lies some 6,000 light-years away in the Puppis constellation. In addition to being beautiful, stars like this one are vital to solving a long-standing astrophysical mystery: How fast is the universe expanding? Different methods, it seems, are spitting out different answers to that question. And that’s a big deal.

"If we're getting different answers that means that there's something that we don't know," Katie Mack, a theoretical cosmologist at North Carolina State University (NCSU) and co-author of a new paper on the measurements, told Live Science this year. "So this is really about not just understanding the current expansion rate of the universe — which is something we're interested in — but understanding how the universe has evolved, how the expansion has evolved, and what space-time has been doing all this time."

Researchers snapped the first images of a "monster galaxy" as elusive as the yeti this year. Rather than the ape-like giant of the Himalayas, this monster churns out stars at a rate that’s 100 times greater than that of the Milky Way. Astronomers seem to have found this beast’s footprints by accident. They got a glimpse of the youthful galaxy’s light as its star-forming illumination glimmered through dust clouds.

The top prize in this year's Nikon Small World microphotography contest went to a developing (and colorful) turtle embryo. To create the technicolor image, a duo of scientists combined fluorescence and stereo microscopy — an optical imaging technique, resulting in the vivid pink hues highlighting the reptile’s growing skeleton and blue and green indicating the textures and patterns in the embryo’s skin and shell.

Just in time for Halloween, creepy starlit eyes peer out from two distant galaxies mid-collision. The galaxies are surrounded by a mishmash of stars from their galactic disks. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope caught the action in a new image released at the end of October. Get a good luck, as the ring structure outlining the “ghost face” will stay around for only about 100 million years; the galactic merger is expected to take about 1 billion to 2 billion years.

Divers off the western Norway came face-to-face with a human-size gelatinous blob that turned out to be a squid mama’s egg sac. In the captured video, a diver slowly circles the spherical and drifting blob enclosed in a transparent membrane. As the diver’s flashlight lights up the innards of the blob, you can see lots of tiny spheres — hundreds of thousands of eggs holding … baby squid. Squee! (Related: Find Out About All the Blobs of 2019)

In this eerie image, NASA's Curiosity Mars rover sits in the Marias Pass, a low valley in Gale Crater. For the past three Martian years, the rover has been breathing in the air above the crater and analyzing that air using the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM), a portable chemistry lab of sorts. The analysis revealed the oxygen levels there fluctuate dramatically as the seasons change, something that can’t be explained by any known chemistry.

The Gemini Observatory captured one of the most graceful and glorious of cosmic duos in the universe: A pair of galaxies some 160 million light-years away called NGC 5394/5 or the Heron Galaxy. In the image, the galaxies are in a sort of waltz, and as they collide, they leave sparkling trails as evidence that stars are forming due to the partners' close moves. Both of these spiral galaxies lie in the constellation Canes: The larger galaxy on the left is about 140,000 light-years across, while the smaller one is 90,000 light-years across.

During its 22nd flyby of Jupiter, the Juno spacecraft discovered a new tempest at the gas giant's south pole. While the flyby was quite a nail-bitter as the solar-powered craft needed to avoid flying into a death trap (a huge shadow where no sun power would be available), the trip revealed a new whirling storm. The storm is part of a cool-looking formation, where six swirling storms are arranged around another, giant one that's as wide as the United States. Before now, scientists had known about the five storms whirling around a center.

"Data from Juno's Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper [JIRAM] instrument indicates we went from a pentagon of cyclones surrounding one at the center to a hexagonal arrangement," Alessandro Mura, a Juno co-investigator at the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome, said in a NASA statement. "This new addition is smaller in stature than its six more established cyclonic brothers: It's about the size of Texas. Maybe JIRAM data from future flybys will show the cyclone growing to the same size as its neighbors."

Glaciologists unveiled the most accurate image showing the contours of the land beneath Antarctica's ice sheet. The results are more than pretty; the portrait should help scientists figure out which regions will be more, or less, susceptible to global warming. The map has also divulged some of the southernmost continent's secrets. For instance, scientists found ridges that protect the ice flowing across the Transantarctic Mountains, they said in a statement.

This week, NASA's Earth Observatory released a gorgeous image of Mount Erebus, protruding from the endless white that is Antarctica. While most of the continent is blanked in our planet's largest single slab of ice, this volcano makes itself known — its summit reaches an elevation of 12,448 feet (3,794 meters) — on Ross Island. Instruments aboard NASA's Terra satellite captured this image, which also shows the Erebus Ice Tongue, a fast-flowing strip of ice that cuts into McMurdo Sound.

A new documentary reveals the behind-the-scenes story of an oddball sky glow endearingly named "Steve" that was first spotted over Canada in 2016 — to the delight of aurora chasers and skywatchers alike. Steve resembled typical aurora in some ways, but its ribbons and ladders of purple and green light were shaped differently than those of other aurora. The documentary, “Chasing Steve,” is currently available to view in Canada on Vimeo, and it will soon be available to rent or purchase in the U.S. via the film's website.

A stunning image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope and processed by geophysicist Benoit Blanco this year shows Hoag's Object — which spans 100,000 light-years across — glistening in the serpent constellation, with a billions of blue stars forming a perfect circle around a much smaller and denser orb of reddish stars; that's not all, lurking in the gap between these star circles is another ring galaxy that's much farther away from us.

Jeanna Bryner is managing editor of Scientific American. Previously she was editor in chief of Live Science and, prior to that, an editor at Scholastic's Science World magazine. Bryner has an English degree from Salisbury University, a master's degree in biogeochemistry and environmental sciences from the University of Maryland and a graduate science journalism degree from New York University. She has worked as a biologist in Florida, where she monitored wetlands and did field surveys for endangered species, including the gorgeous Florida Scrub Jay. She also received an ocean sciences journalism fellowship from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. She is a firm believer that science is for everyone and that just about everything can be viewed through the lens of science.

World river maps

Super blood moon eclipse

Humpback whale mama

Ray courtship

Black hole jets

Milky Way star map

Deepest universe view

Twisted milky way

Painted wolves

Wildlife photography awards

Penguin Chicks Warm

Cardinal gynandromorph

Fly testes

Yosemite firefall

Hookwinker sunfish

Tarantula eats opossum

Tiny ancient frog

Shark captures parrotfish

Hitchhiking argonaut

Cosmic bat

Equinox Earth

Long-tusked elephant

Saturn ring moons

Inside-out toad

Baby crocodile

Buff monkey

Bering Sea ice

Phantom predator

Mantle blobs

Glacier tongue

Deep-sea vent

Alps glaciers

Isopods devour alligator

First black hole image

Balloon creature

Notre Dame burning

Superbloom

Cassowary

Nightmare crab

Solar flare

Cracked moon

Peru forest disappearance

Ancient millipede

3-eyed snake

Milk ducts

Slingshot spider

Great white shark

Face mites

Albino panda

Creepy, invisible teeth

Volcano shadow

Permafrost melting

Glowing tears

Antarctica seal

Moon anomaly

Giraffe baby

Sparkling DNA

Space atlas

Greenland sled dogs

Raikoke volcano

Astronomy photo contest

Astronomy photo contest

Eclipse and hurricane

Sea star butt

SoCal quake

Python swallows

Dark Sky parks

Split sunset

Crystal tardigrade

Piglet squid

Radio halo

ISS-sun

Cosmic baby pic

Baby crocs

Iron-shelled snail

Twisted Milky Way

Firecloud

STEVE

Polarstern

Radio bubbles