Mysterious exploding star and more — January’s best science images

Under the stars. This panoramic photo of Paepalanthus flowers under the Milky Way in Brazil’s Chapada dos Veadeiros national park was a winner of the 2023 Nature Photography Contest. To capture the shot, landscape photographer Marcio Cabral illuminated the flowers with a lamp and used a camera specialized for astrophotography.

Ready for the close-up. Capturing this microscopic cross section of marram grass (Ammophila arenaria) stems was a challenge for photographer Gerhard Vlcek, who won the Micro category of the Close-up Photographer of the Year contest with this colourful shot (see below for a selection of other winning entries). “Staining and preparing the sample was very tricky,” Vlcek writes in his competition entry. “I had to use the tiniest brush to manipulate the less-than-1mm parts in different staining and chemical solutions before positioning the stems on the slide. After that, taking the photograph was the easy part!”

Tiny spines. Each plasma-etched cone on this glass surface measures less than one-hundredth of a millimetre across. The features, captured using a scanning electron microscope, were created as part of a European Space Agency project to improve the reliability of atomic clocks for space; these involve glass components that can become degraded by chemical etching and other processes.

Dry January. The Kashmir Valley is a popular winter tourist destination owing to its mountains and ski resorts — such as Gulmarg, pictured here, where the hills are normally snow-covered in January. But the valley has been afflicted by an exceptional drought, with no snow and an almost 80% shortfall in rain between December 2023 and the first week of January. In future, droughts in the region could become more regular and extended as a result of climate change, scientists have warned. As well as affecting tourism, water scarcity has negative impacts on saffron farming and other agriculture.

Lost cities. Scientists have revealed the extent of a sprawling ancient settlement hidden beneath dense vegetation in the Amazon rainforest using LIDAR imaging combined with ground excavations. The 2,500-year-old remains include a series of interconnected cities — including houses, plazas, roads and canals — in eastern Ecuador that are comparable in size to those of Mayan cities in Mexico and Central America. Archaeologists think that the cities could have been home to tens or even hundreds of thousands of people for up to 1,000 years, but little is known about what their society was like.

Star debris. A composite image of Cassiopeia A, the remnant of an exploded star, or supernova, brings together data from several NASA telescopes: X-rays from Chandra (blue), infrared data from the JWST and Spitzer (red, green, blue) and optical data from Hubble (red and white). While analysing the Chandra data, researchers found that filaments in the outer part of Cassiopeia A closely matched the X-ray properties of a mysterious structure in the remnant called the Green Monster; this was first identified in JWST infrared data from April 2023. “We already suspected the Green Monster was created by a blast wave from the exploded star slamming into material surrounding it,” Jacco Vink, an astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam, said in a statement. “Chandra helped us clinch the case.”

Frozen lake. A few snow-free days offered a rare opportunity for photographer Mériol Lehmann to photograph the unusual patterns of ice on the surface of this frozen lake in the Lac-Saint-Jean region of Quebec, Canada. “Usually, at this time, there is abundant snow … the icy surface of the lake is thus always invisible,” says Lehmann. “My family has had a farm there for 40 years, and this is the first time I have witnessed such a spectacle.” The photo was taken using a drone.

Seal settlers. This group of grey seals was spotted lounging on the beach at Les Hemmes de Marck on France’s Opal coast on 1 January. The species disappeared from northern France in the 1970s, because of fishing. But since the introduction of protective measures in the 1980s, the animals have begun to return. More than 1,000 seals now live in the area, but their future is uncertain owing to the health consequences of ocean warming.