With 2025 nearly in the books, let’s revisit some of the highlights of the year in space, from astronomy to spaceflight.
An Unprecedented Observatory
NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory
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Astronomers entered a mind-blowing new era this year with the first light of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. The observatory was designed to scan the sky in incredible detail. The first major task of its scientific career will be to conduct a 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) project—creating a jaw-droppingly detailed movie of the cosmos around us that researchers hope could help them understand the solar system, the Milky Way and the universe’s mysterious dark matter and dark energy.
During a first-light event in June, scientists revealed the product of just 10 hours of observations—images that seem to zoom forever, a treasure trove of galaxies and colorful clouds of gas and dust splashed across the sky.
Stellar Shells
NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI (image); Yinuo Han/California Institute of Technology/Ryan White/Macquarie University (science); Alyssa Pagan/STScI (image processing)
This stunning image comes from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and shows delicately nested spirals of material thrown out over some 700 years by a celestial system called Apep. Apep includes two so-called Wolf-Rayet stars, which are bright, massive stars that eject huge amounts of material for a few million years before they collapse into a black hole or neutron star, depending on their size. Apep also includes a third star, a massive supergiant.
A New Rocket Takes Flight
Carrying NASA’s twin ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) spacecraft, Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket launched on November 13, 2025, from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Blue Origin
In January Blue Origin’s brand-new, reusable heavy-lift vehicle New Glenn made its inaugural flight, marking the company’s first trip to orbit against a backdrop of short, regular suborbital jaunts. During that first flight, the rocket’s booster missed the key goal of landing on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean for future reuse. But in November New Glenn nailed that maneuver as well.
Auroras Paint the Skies
An aurora seen over Monroe, Wis., on November 11, 2025.
Ross Harried/NurPhoto via Getty Images
The sun is officially out of its period of maximum solar activity, but that doesn’t mean it’s quiet. In November a flurry of solar outbursts stunned sky watchers as far south as Mexico and Florida with jaw-dropping auroras.
There’s still a chance that the sun will produce more fireworks as its magnetic activity quiets down as it approaches the so-called solar minimum in 2030 or 2031. But November’s celestial spectacle may be the last good display until the sun’s next period of high activity.
A Cosmic Chameleon
CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA (image); T. A. Rector/University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF NOIRLab/M. Zamani/D. de Martin/NSF NOIRLab (image processing) (CC BY 4.0)
The dark molecular cloud Chamaeleon I is the star-forming region that is closest to Earth and is part of the larger Chamaeleon Complex. The image of the dark cloud comes from the Dark Energy Camera—a powerful survey instrument mounted to the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.
Baby Solar Systems
N. Engler et al./SPHERE Consortium/ESO
While we Earthlings have been enjoying our annual twirl through the solar system, scientists have shared baby photographs of a whole menagerie of other star systems, thanks to the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. The results look surprisingly familiar: many of the debris disks that the researchers imaged sport structures that mimic those of our own solar system, such as a belt of giant planets bordered on the inside by asteroids and on the outside by comets.
Hello, Earth!
NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona/Lockheed Martin
Images of Earth from space offer a dramatic source of perspective on daily life. Take, for example, this video of Earth captured by the NASA spacecraft Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security–Apophis Explorer (OSIRIS-APEX).
The spacecraft snapped the photograph on September 23 while it was 2,136 miles from Earth using its StowCam imager, which played a crucial role in the mission’s original task of collecting space rock samples from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu. Now the spacecraft is facing its dramatic second act: in 2029 it will fly past another near-Earth asteroid, Apophis, two months after that asteroid will make an approach so close to Earth that it will be visible to some two billion people. Needless to say, we’re going to want all the spacecraft’s instruments in top form when that moment comes.
Ripples in a Celestial Pond
NASA/ESA/Imad Pasha/Yale University/Pieter van Dokkum/Yale University
The iconic Hubble Space Telescope celebrated its 35th birthday this year, and the beloved observatory is still going strong. Consider this image of the galaxy LEDA 1313424, which researchers have nicknamed the “Bullseye” and which is about two and half times the size of the Milky Way, the galaxy we live in.
The stunning image shows the eight nested rings that inspired the Bullseye moniker. (Additional observations by a telescope in Hawaii detected a ninth ring, too.) The rings are ripples created when a small blue dwarf galaxy—visible to the left of LEDA 1313424 in Hubble’s image—blazed through the Bullseye’s heart about 50 million years ago.
Interstellar Visitor
NASA/ESA/D. Jewitt/University of California, Los Angeles (image); J. DePasquale/STScI (image processing)
One of the highlights of 2025 was the long-awaited discovery of the third known interstellar object, now known as Comet 3I/ATLAS. The comet burst onto the scene at the beginning of July, zipping through our solar system at speeds so fast that it must have originated at a different star, astronomers rapidly determined. Within weeks, the Hubble Space Telescope had spotted the otherworldly object and photographed the glowing coma of gas surrounding the comet’s body.
Since then countless other spacecraft have gotten in on the act. Perhaps most mind-blowing have been observations gathered by missions stationed at Mars, which the comet flew past in early October. Now Comet 3I/ATLAS is on its way out of our celestial neighborhood. But astronomers are still working to catch more glimpses of the elusive object—expect more science to come from this year’s visit in 2026.
Earth Orbiters
NASA
Astronauts living and working onboard the International Space Station captured this image of a fellow Earth orbiter, the moon, earlier this year when the laboratory was zipping over Bolivia and Brazil as it flew into one of the 16 sunsets that the outpost enjoys each day. The moon’s apparently squished appearance is an illusion caused by Earth’s atmosphere refracting our natural satellite’s light.
