The Fifteen Most Stunning Science and Nature Images of 2019 (Part I)
2019 was great for many reasons. Baby Yoda came into our lives, we figured out what to do if 30-50 feral hogs stormed our backyards, and the Keanu Reeves renaissance began. But it was also a great year for all things science. Here are the fifteen best science photographs that captured our eyes and minds in 2019.
Can't get enough? Check out part two of these amazing photos. Want to see even more incredible photos? Have a look at these photos of wintery Mars.
These images first appeared on Live Science.
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Rangers in the Northern Territory, Australia, were amazed when they came across this wild carpet python snake that had three functioning eyes. It's not unheard of for animals to have three eyes, but it's still rare enough to have caused quite a stir.
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This is the deepest view of the universe ever taken, combining hundreds of photos taken by the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF). This image contains 10,000 galaxies.
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This out of this world photograph shows a mother humpback whale with her calf in the distance, and was taken by underwater photographer Francois Baelen while diving in the Western Indian Ocean.
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A computer generated image of charged particles near the edge of a black hole, rotating and twisting magnetic fields. This image was created by Kyle Parfrey (who works for NASA) and shows how dense positrons get when nearing a black hole.
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This colorful map of Australia shows all the river systems in the continent. The map was created by cartographer Robert Szucs, who has a background in geographic information systems - and a bit of a thing for colors.
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An amazing action shot of gannets catching fish underwater. This photo was a finalist in the Natural World & Wildlife category of the 2019 Sony World Photography Awards, taken by Tracey Lund.
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This image isn't what you think it is. A psychedelic galaxy? Nope. It's actually an image of a fruit fly's testes. Biologist Ben Walsh took this image after staining the testes of a dissected fruit fly with fluorescent dye then capturing the result through a microscope with his iPhone.
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This white-faced saki monkey named Bea was temporarily famous on social media after this image was captured of her buff body. Her body looks relatively large to her face - almost as if she had been working out. It was later discovered that it wasn't buff, but puff. Bea had puffed her fur up.
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We know what it looks like, but that's not hot lava pouring off the side of a mountain. It's actually the winter light hitting the melting snow on El Capitan (a mountain in Yosemite National Park) just as the sun is setting. It is, however, called a firefall.
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Earth, taken during the spring equinox, with half of the planet darkened by shadow. During the spring equinox, the amount of daylight and darkness are nearly equal at all latitudes, creating perfect symmetry.
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We couldn't create a list of the best science photography of 2019 without including the first photo taken of a black hole. Although blurry, this image did what many thought impossible. The image doesn't actually show the black hole (that isn't possible as all light and time gets sucked into them), but the photo does show the accumulation of matter and particles sitting just beyond the event horizon of M87.
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In this deep-sea vent, hydrothermal fluid bubbles upwards but gets trapped by a mineral ledge, causing them to spill over the edge. In 2019, scientists found many hydrothermal vents full of crystallized gases, pools of boiling fluids, and many-colored life forms. This purple color is the actual color of the vent!
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This cute little fella is a newfound crab called Callichimaera perplexa, which means "perplexing beautiful chimera." And it lives up to it's name: this crab has claws of a modern frog crab, paddle-like appendages that belong to sea scorpions, and the mouth of a shrimp. It's long extinct now, living around 90 million years ago.
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This flat-topped, dormant volcano in the Canary Islands casts a mysteriously triangle shadow. Taken by photographer Juan Carlos Casado, this image is not edited. The reason why the volcano's shape is triangular has to do with the position where the photo was taken from. The observer is looking down the long corridor of a sunset shadow, which will always (no matter what the shape of the mountain) appear to taper off into a triangle, like parallel train tracks do.
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This image of the Daedalus Crater on the far side of the Moon, shows just how pockmarked and fractured the Moon's surface is. New analysis reveals that cracks from asteroid impacts can extend up to 12 miles deep, and it is estimated that a single asteroid impact could fragment the lunar crust so much that surface cracks extend for hundreds of miles.
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