Every month WIRED will be handpicking the most stunning space images and here is our selection for April. Scroll down to see selections from previous months.
May 26: Nasa released images of Jupiter taken by the Juno spacecraft. These included previously-unseen poles, a timelapse of cyclones and shots of unexpected structures believed to be ammonia welling up from the planet's deep atmosphere to form "giant weather systems".
May 17: A cold spot in our Universe turned out not to be caused by a massive void, leaving open the possibility of parallel universes. According to the authors of the paper, the most likely explanation for the spot is our Universe, in its early stages, collided with another ‘bubble’ Universe – so-called because it grows like a bubble out of a vacuum.
May 12: A Neptune-like planet 450 light-years away was found to have an atmosphere rich in water, complete with clouds, and the surprising find suggests not all solar systems form like ours did.
May 10: The most detailed map yet of volcanic activity on Jupiter’s moon Io was released, showing complex waves of lava covering its largest volcanic lake.
May 5: Cassini completed its first in a series of dives through the 1,500-mile-wide (2,400km) gap between Saturn and its rings at the end of April, releasing some incredible shots. In May, Nasa combined these images to produce dizzying footage.
April 26: Nasa’s Cassini started its ‘Grande Finale’ – a suicide mission into the burning heart of its planet. After its first of 22 dives in between Saturn and its rings, the spacecraft sent the closest ever images of the planet back to Earth.
April 24: Astronomers discovered the process behind a mysterious type of 'aurora' light, after a picture was posted on Facebook. When the mysterious purple streak was first discovered in British Columbia, it appeared to be the first of its kind.
April 19: A newly discovered exoplanet caused excitement among astronomers as it has the potential to give us the best opportunity ever to find alien life.
April 18: The first sighting of a halo of hydrogen wafting around the Milky Way provided an answer to some of the 'missing mass' in our galaxy.
April 10: A faint distant galaxy spotted for the first time revealed what the early Universe looked like. The galaxy, 13.1 billion light years away, is helping astronomers study an epoch called 'reionisation'.
April 7: The 'stellar fireworks' left behind after stars were born in dramatic explosions was caught on camera. A group of astronomers caught the aftermath from an explosive event when two young stars grazed past each other.
March 31: SpaceX achieved an historic goal by launching and landing a rocket it had previously used.
March 30: New York-based Clouds Architecture Office revealed a design for a skyscraper, The Analemma Tower, that would be anchored not to the Earth, but to a nearby asteroid affixed to our planet's orbit.
March 21: Pictures taken by the Rosetta spacecraft captured a comet landslide in action for the first time.
March 16: The Science Museum recreated Peake's return journey to solid ground, in collaboration with Alchemy VR.
March 6: The European Space Agency (Esa) released a series of pictures revealing Mars' latest fascinating geological feature – a giant channel created by ancient mega-floods more than 3 billion years ago.
March 1: The most detailed map yet of dark matter in the Universe was published by scientists at Yale University. By studying the distribution of dark matter in the Universe, we will get closer to understanding what it is made of.
February 22: In a remarkable discovery, Nasa found seven Earth-sized exoplanets orbiting a single distant star in February.
February 21: Alan Stern, the head of Nasa's New Horizons mission to Pluto, and a host of other scientists from the space agency and universities proposed a new definition for a planet last month.
February 19: On February 19, Elon Musk's Falcon 9 rocket launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, landing successfully nine minutes later.
February 15: No longer resigned to seasoned astronomers, anyone can now join the hunt for extraterrestrials in our galactic neighbourhood thanks to the release of a data set from the Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey.
February 9: Astronomers have, for the first time, witnessed a comet-like object being ripped apart and scattered across the atmosphere of a white dwarf.
February 9: Science minister Jo Johnson announced plans to make £10 million available to help further develop commercial space programs in the UK.
February 7: In February, WIRED spoke to astronomer Guillem Anglada-Escudé who took four years to form the team that found Proxima b, the closest Earth-like planet to our solar system.
In December, water ice was found lurking on Ceres, Esa let us soar above Mars' ravines and the Geminid meteor shower peaked at the same time as the supermoon.
December 5: At the start of the month, Virgin Galactic’s successor to its SpaceShipTwo spacecraft successfully performed its first unpowered glide and landing.
December 9: You can now see Mars like never before thanks to an ESA video that highlights the Mawrth Vallis ravine, an area thought to have once carried water on the Red Planet.
December 12: The Physics World Breakthrough of the Year was awarded to the Ligo team for its discovery of gravitational waves in December, as the year drew to a close.
December 12: In April, a team of scientists announced a new project to explore interstellar space named Breakthrough Starshot.
December 13: In December, a potentially divisive theory suggested Einstein may have been wrong to say the speed of light is a constant – and the claims could soon be tested with a new generation of space telescopes.
December 14: November saw a staggering supermoon that was the closest it will be to Earth until 2034, but it wasn't the final supermoon of 2016.
December 15: Water ice was found on the dwarf planet Ceres.
In November, meteorites confirmed a long-held theory about the 'birth' of our solar system, a rare faint dwarf galaxy was found on the edges of the Milky Way and dark matter was given a 'face.'
November 3: A crack in Earth’s magnetic shield let galactic cosmic rays leak into the Earth’s atmosphere and caused huge geomagnetic storms in the northern hemisphere.
November 4: At the start of November, physicists used elaborate computer calculations to come up with an outline of the particles of dark matter.
November 7: For as long as overpopulation of Earth has been a concern, space colonies have been punted as the solution. These illustrations, developed by Nasa's Ames Research Center and illustrated by Don Davis and Rick Guidice, depict how setting up home in space might have looked, had the mindset (and funding) that brought us the Apollo missions continued.
November 8: New Aviation Horizons is the centrepiece of the Environmentally Responsible Aviation (ERA) project, which aims to develop technologies that allow the aviation industry to fly more people longer distances, while using less fuel and producing fewer emissions and noise.
November 15: On November 14, skygazers witnessed the closest full Moon since 1948.
November 16: As Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft blasted past Pluto at around 58,536 km/h it captured more data and images on the dwarf planet than ever before.
November 22: Just beyond our galaxy, in the halo of the Milky Way, lies an extremely faint dwarf satellite galaxy. Called Virgo I, the satellite lies in the direction of the constellation Virgo.
November 29: A research team, led by University of Minnesota School of Physics and Astronomy Professor Yong-Zhong Qian, used new models and meteorites to show that a low-mass supernova triggered the formation of our system.
In October, researchers from the University of Michigan discovered a new dwarf planet lurking in the Kuiper Belt, the mystery of space's 'Bermuda Triangle' was solved and miniscule moonlets may be causing mysterious waves in the rings around Uranus.
Every month WIRED will be handpicking the most stunning space images and here is our selection for October. Scroll down to see selections from previous months.
WIRED’s November issue focused on big ambition and photographer Benedict Redgrove gained unprecedented access into Nasa’s future projects to see where the future of space travel is going. This gallery of images show where Nasa has been, where it's going and how it plans to get us to Mars.
October 7: At the start of October, the Hubble Space Telescope had another result. The giant space viewer spotted "superhot blobs of gas" emerging from a distant star system.
October 9: It sounds like the plot of a low-budget sci-fi movie: satellites in orbit are subject to a mysterious navigational blackout when they pass over the equator between South America and Africa – and it only happens at night. Now, the culprit turns out to be thunderstorms in space – or more specifically the ionosphere, between 300 and 600km above the Earth (the official boundary between atmosphere and space is 100km).
October 13: Our solar system may have a brand new dwarf planet, orbiting in the region beyond Pluto in the Kuiper Belt.
October 14: The observable Universe is a lot more crowded than astronomers previously thought and may contain more than 2,000 billion galaxies.
October 16: In August, astronomers declared to great fanfare they had discovered a 'second Earth' orbiting nearby star Proxima Centauri, four light-years away. Now, further to this, researchers from Harvard have found Proxima Centauri may be more like our own Sun than previously thought.
October 24: Unexplained waves in Uranus’ rings suggest there may be two tiny, unknown moonlets orbiting around the planet.
In September, Nasa captured a rare 'double eclipse' as the Moon and Earth crossed the Sun, water vapour plumes were spotted on Jupiter's moon Europa and the 12-year Rosetta mission came to an end.
September 5: Nasa’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) caught a glimpse of a double eclipse when the Earth and Moon lined up to block its view of the Sun.
September 14: Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope finally captured a star being 'reborn' in real time over a period of 30 years. SAO 244567 is 2,700 light-years from Earth and is in the Stingray Nebula.
September 26: Astronomers studying data taken as Hubble was pointing at Jupiter's moon Europe spotted water vapour plumes coming from its surface.
September 30: We've selected two images from the end of the Rosetta mission to mark its momentous occasion. After 12 years, millions of miles and a few hiccups along the way, the Rosetta mission came to an end on the last day of September.
The probe successfully 'crashed' into its companion comet, 67P at around 12.20pm BST and ESA's Rosetta mission Twitter handled simply tweeted: 'Mission complete', alongside a cartoon of the probe.
In August, astronomers discovered a nearby Earth-like exoplanet that is a strong contender for harbouring alien life and witnessed the destruction of a comet hurtling at 1.3 million miles per hour into the Sun.
August 8: The distant star KIC 8462852 keeps on getting dimmer but astronomers still don't know why. The latest observations of this star, which is 1,480 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, confirm it's getting progressively dimmer while sharp dips in its brightness suggest objects are passing in front of it.
August 8: Nasa and the ESA have captured the moment a comet was destroyed as it hurtled towards the Sun.
August 17: Astronomers monitoring a star over a twelve-year period managed to capture evidence showing the white dwarf exploding out of its long hibernation. A team from Warsaw University Observatory was able to observe evidence of periodic dwarf nova explosions over six years before it erupted with a huge classical nova explosion.
August 22: Nasa celebrated the Mars Curiosity Rover's four-year-anniversary on the Red Planet by releasing a 360-degree panoramic shot of the Martian landscape. The shot is a combination of more than 130 images taken over the course of one day.
August 23: Nasa managed to regain contact with a spacecraft that had been silent for almost two years. The Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (Stereo) B spacecraft lost contact with the Earth as it passed behind the Sun in 2014, but in August Nasa announced it had finally managed to reconnect with the missing object.
August 24: China's national space agency unveiled concept images of the rover it plans to send to Mars in 2020. The mission will be launched in July or August 2020 from the Wenchang space launch centre in China's Hainan province.
August 24: A newly-discovered 'Earth-like' exoplanet just outside our Solar System could be the perfect breeding ground for alien life. At just four-and-a-half light years away, Proxima b is our closest exoplanet and astronomers believe its surface is the perfect temperature for liquid water – the key ingredient for life.
August 25: Astronomers discovered a huge galaxy composed 99.9 per cent of dark matter. Dragonfly 44 is roughly the same mass as the Milky Way, but our galaxy has a hundred times more stars.
August 30: If the mysterious Planet 9 exists, it could end up 'eliminating' our Solar System when the Sun dies. Dr Dimitri Veras from the University of Warwick plotted how our star's demise would affect the Solar System and found that, if it exists, Planet 9 could hurtle into one of the outer planets, destroying them as our Solar System ends.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
