Incredible view of the Milky Way and more — June’s best science images

Star-studded sky. This spellbinding sight, captured by photographer Stefan Liebermann, shows the Milky Way arch over baobab trees in Madagascar. The clouds of colour are caused by airglow — the effects of processes in the atmosphere such as light-emitting chemical reactions or the recombination of charged atoms. The shot was one of 25 selected for this year’s Milky Way Photographer of the Year competition. “This photo means a lot to me, and I can’t even begin to tell you how difficult it was to take,” said Lieberman. “From the road conditions to the armed security guards protecting you while you take photos, everything about it was an adventure.”

Making starlight. This striking image shows four powerful lasers that form part of the Very Large Telescope in the Atacama Desert, Chile. The lasers make sodium atoms in the atmosphere glow like artificial stars, allowing the telescope to correct for atmospheric distortion of the light from real stars, and so create sharp images. The Very Large Telescope — run by the European Southern Observatory — obtained its first images 25 years ago, in May 1998, and has since been involved in key research including studies of the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.

Something in the air. Smoke from wildfires raging across Canada turned skies orange across the northeastern United States, leading to the unusual and disturbing sight of New York City choked with toxic smoke. More than four million hectares of forest have already burnt across Canada this year — double the historical average and a number that is usually reached much later in the season. There is no solid explanation for the extreme fire season, but scientists say climate change is a factor in promoting extremely hot, dry and windy weather across the country.

Deep-sea refuge. This Paramuricea clavata coral was photographed during an expedition off the south coast of France called Noah’s Ark of the Depths. Last summer in the western Mediterranean, these corals — called gorgonians — suffered a massive die-off because of abnormally high temperatures. But the expedition’s findings offer some hope: gorgonians below a certain depth have survived, because their surroundings are less affected by temperature changes. Scientists have taken samples and will analyse the corals’ DNA to better understand how they relate to others in the region.

Staring into space. Researchers have released the first batch of data from a project that uses a telescope in Arizona — retrofitted with thousands of small robotic arms — to capture light spectra from 35 million galaxies. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) aims to produce the largest-ever spectroscopic survey of galaxies and reconstruct the Universe’s history of expansion. This visualization shows DESI’s ‘one percent’ survey — a 3D map of 700,000 objects imaged from 20 directions in the sky that covers about 1% of the total area that DESI will study.