An entire century has passed since the year 2000 – how time flies! In that time, science and technology have provided us with some amazing things.
Countless missions to space, cures for diseases and a total of 46 different iPhones! But while we could sit here and recount by word the many achievements, let us show you instead.
We've picked out the best and most amazing images of the 21st century, both on Earth and further afield.
Best selfie ever, Mont Mercou, Mars
Mont Mercou, Mars - 2021
Launched in 2011, NASA’s Curiosity Rover was sent to search for signs that life could have existed on Mars. It has now spent well over a decade on the Red Planet, carrying out experiments with its onboard laboratory.
While Curiosity isn’t heading back to Earth any time soon, the take-home message from its Martian campaign is that the planet once had free-flowing water and the kind of chemistry suitable for supporting life, namely microbes.
One of Curiosity’s most memorable moments came in 2021, when the six-wheeled wanderer took this cheeky selfie while posing on a small outcrop of rock that scientists named Mont Mercou, after the French mountain. It’s perhaps not quite the ‘moment’ that it first appears, though.
To create the selfie, scientists had to composite 60 images taken over two days with two cameras – most by using a robot arm like a selfie stick and the remainder using the ‘Mastcam’ on Curiosity’s head.
Mummified mammoth
The Yukon, Canada - 2022
This is Nun Cho Ga, the only whole baby woolly mammoth to have been discovered in North America (near Dawson City, Yukon) to date.
In the Hän language spoken in the region where her mummified remains were found, her name means ‘big baby animal’. Nun Cho Ga was preserved in permafrost for 30,000 years before gold miners found her and handed her over to the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation and Yukon governments.
In 2024, she was moved to the Canadian Conservation Institute to be carefully preserved.
Lost in the shadows
America (From the Deep Sea Space Climate Observatory), 2024
A total solar eclipse happens only once every year and a half, and not everyone on Earth experiences a total eclipse each time – only those along a band called the ‘path of totality’. This is where the Moon’s shadow tracks briefly across Earth.
On 8 April 2024, Americans across 13 US states experienced totality. This image of the Moon’s shadow was captured by the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) housed in the Deep Space Climate Observatory satellite. America, say “Cheese!”.
Out of his head
Singapore – 2017
It’s hard to find any sympathy for flies, but try to spare a thought for this ill-fated fellow, who has vacated his skull following colonisation by the parasitic ‘zombie fungus’.
Cordyceps (Ophiocordyceps unilateralis) fungi infect and take over the minds of their insect victims, which are generally ants, but also flies. The fungi don’t seem to infect their victims’ brains directly; instead, they release mind-controlling molecules to do their bidding.
Infection ends with the hapless insect climbing to the fungus’ ideal sporing height, where it bursts through the insect’s skull.
Ghost in the machine
Geneva, Switzerland – 2017
How do you catch a particle that travels at near-light speed and weighs virtually nothing? That’s what this huge, gold, waffle-surfaced box is designed to do.
Constructed between 2016–2018 at the CERN facility in Switzerland, the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is one of two prototypes for larger, US-based versions being built to detect fundamental particles called neutrinos (also known as ‘ghost particles’), which originate from the nuclear reactions occurring within stars.
The chamber acts as a Thermos flask for liquid argon, which boils at very low temperatures, so must be held below -184°C (-299.2°F). It contains detectors that can capture traces of the electrons released when neutrinos hit argon atoms.
While neutrinos don’t interact with much – trillions pass through us every minute with seemingly no effect – the density of atoms in liquid argon makes their interactions easier to sense.
When operational, the new full-size chambers (20 times bigger than DUNE’s) will hold 72,000 tonnes of argon and be able to detect beams of neutrinos fired from test facilities 1,300km (almost 810 miles) away. Scientists hope the chambers will help them fit neutrinos into the particle puzzle.
Touchdown on Titan
Titan (from the Huygens Probe) – 2005
“We’ll soon be landing in Adiri. The weather is breezy with temperatures of -170°C (-274°F).” We can imagine space tourists one day hearing these words as they prepare to disembark at a spaceport on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.
As of now, though, the Huygens probe remains the moon’s only visitor from Earth – mainly because getting there is such a chore. Having departed at the end of the 20th century – October 1997 – aboard the Cassini spacecraft, it took the robotic lander until January 2005 to begin its descent to Titan’s surface.
As it parachuted into the moon’s Adiri region, Huygens took a number of photographs, including this one, before making a soft landing in sand and dirty ice.
Thanks to the lander’s (strictly business) trip, we now know that Titan’s atmosphere contains complex organic compounds and its surface is scarred with dried-out rivulets of what may have been liquid methane.
Head in the clouds
11,000m (36,000 ft) above the Pacific Ocean – 2016
Santiago ‘The Storm Pilot’ Borja has received many plaudits for the pictures he takes from the cockpit of his Boeing 767 passenger plane.
He initially tried taking photos of mountains and cities, but realised they were too small to appreciate from the air. So he switched to taking photos of the weather instead, often using lightning to illuminate the scenery.
Although he uses relatively long exposures, his photos aren’t blurry: the lightning works as a fast flash. This atmospheric image focuses on an ‘overshooting top’ – a patch of cloud where strong updraughts in a thunderstorm have caused a protrusion from the top of a cumulonimbus.
They’re small in meteorological terms, measuring around 15km (about nine miles) across. Textbook examples appear as distinct spots in infrared satellite imagery. Overshooting tops are important in meteorology because they mark the location of the most severe conditions in storms.
Sink or swim
Masai Mara, Kenya - 2020
The River Talek in Kenya is one of five tributaries that flow into the Mara River, which drains the famous Maasai Mara National Reserve.
Home to elephants, wildebeest, rhinos and big cats, like these cheetahs, the Maasai Mara is a wildlife haven and safari destination. But when the region was inundated with flood waters in January 2020, the river burst its banks and there were fears that animal populations would be swept away – as one man was, while trying to cross a bridge over the river.
The cheetahs in this image also faced a difficult crossing, though witnesses say they were lucky enough to survive. Meanwhile, camps in the Maasai Mara were flooded and some tourists had to be rescued after seeking refuge on rooftops.
Unfortunately, the region continues to be hit by deadly flooding, which is attributed to climate change. In May 2024, the River Talek broke its banks once again, following a particularly intense rainy season. Around 200 people are thought to have lost their lives in flash floods and mudslides.
Playing with fire
Reykjanes peninsula, Iceland – 2022
Volcano tourism has exploded in recent decades, as thrill-seeking hikers flock to hotspots like the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park or the smoking craters of Mount Etna in Sicily.
The risks of doing so aren’t to be taken lightly, however. In December 2019, a tour group visiting the White Island in New Zealand was caught out when the volcano erupted, killing 22 of the 47 tourists.
Still, when lava started spewing from the ground at the Reykjanes Peninsula in Iceland in 2021, some sightseers remained undeterred. Iceland is, of course, well-known for its volcanic activity, but this region is easily accessible from the capital, Reykjavik. In this photo, taken a year later, tourists are witnessing an eruption at a second location, about a kilometre away in the Meradalir Valley.
Prior to 2021, there hadn’t been much volcanic activity in the area since the 12th century, but now, new vents are opening up on a regular basis. In 2023, a 3km-long (1.8-mile) crack appeared not far from the fishing town of Grindavík, prompting 3,800 people to leave their homes. Many have yet to return.
Centre of attraction
Sagittarius A• (From Earth) – 2022
We first stared into the astronomical abyss in 2019, when the international team of scientists working at the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) captured an image of M87*, a supermassive black hole in the centre of a galaxy 53 million light-years from Earth.
Three years later, the EHT team used its global array of telescopes to produce this composite image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole that lies 26,000 light-years away at the centre of the Milky Way – our home galaxy. In this image and the image of M87*, it’s not the black holes we see, but the glowing gases swirling around them.
Even though it’s considerably closer, it was much harder to get a clear shot of Sagittarius A* because of its lower mass. At ‘only’ 4 million times the size of the Sun, it’s a baby compared to M87*, which is a whopping 6.5 billion times bigger than the star at the centre of our Solar System.
This size discrepancy means the gases swirl around Sagittarius A* within minutes, as opposed to days at M87*, making for a changing pattern of brightness that’s difficult to image. EHT scientists are now working to produce the first movie of a black hole, after the 15m-wide (49ft) Africa Millimetre Telescope in Namibia was added to the array.
Basking in the Sun's glow
Saturn (From the Cassini Spacecraft) – 2006
NASA launched its Cassini spacecraft from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 1997. Seven years later, it reached Saturn, its primary destination, having travelled 3.4 billion kilometres and taken in the sights of Jupiter along the way.
Upon its arrival at Saturn, the spacecraft embarked on a grand tour of the ringed planet’s many moons, including Titan (where it dropped off the Huygens lander – see p10), Dione, Enceladus and Rhea. In total, Cassini collected 453,000 images during its mission, including this stunning portrait of Saturn, taken as the planet occulted the Sun.
Saturn’s rings were discovered over 400 years ago by Galileo, but, backlit like this, they appear brighter and perhaps more beautiful than we’ve ever seen them. Although they look smooth and continuous, they’re actually formed from billions of pieces of water ice and rock – some as small as grains of rice, some as big as mountains.
With the information Cassini was able to gather, scientists were able to learn more about where this material comes from. For instance, we now know that many of the icy chunks in the E-ring – one of the fainter, outer rings – were vented from Enceladus.
Record-breaking resolution
North Carolina, USA – 2023
This is a slice through a brain scan that’s 64 million times sharper than any ordinary magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine is capable of producing.
The full, 3D version – unveiled in 2023 on the 50th anniversary of the invention of magnetic resonance imaging – allowed scientists to view mind-boggling details of the circuitry inside a mouse’s brain.
It’s the result of four decades of work at Duke University’s Center for In Vivo Microscopy. Researchers there plan to use ultra-high-resolution scanning to study brain tumours and get to grips with what’s really going on in neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s disease.
Big machine seeks small particles
Geneva, Switzerland – 2005
ATLAS is the world’s biggest particle detector, housed at the CERN facility in Switzerland. It catches fallout from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which fires beams of high-energy particles at each other inside a 27km (almost 17 miles) doughnut-shaped tunnel under Geneva.
This image was taken before the final pieces were lowered in and the LHC was powered up. Following its detection of the Higgs boson in 2012, scientists began upgrading ATLAS. In 2020, two new detectors were installed that can pinpoint the position of a muon particle to within a tenth of a millimetre in less than one 400,000th of a second.
California burns
Ventura County, California – 2019
In 2019, wildfires raged across 1,122km 2 (697 sq miles) of California. The ‘Maria’ fire (right) engulfed 16km 2 (10 sq miles) of Ventura County before firefighters could put it out.
More than 10,000 people evacuated their homes as it rampaged through the region just northwest of Los Angeles, all while firefighters across California battled other large blazes. But 2019 was a ‘good’ year for California – the average area consumed by wildfires is currently closer to 4,000km 2 (2,485 sq miles).
The California Air Resources Board says hotter, drier conditions driven by climate change are increasing the frequency and severity of wildfires.
Pluto, up close
Pluto (From the Horizon’s spacecraft) – 2015
When NASA launched its New Horizons spacecraft in 2006, Pluto was still a planet and the only one in the Solar System that remained completely unexplored.
Later that same year, however, Pluto lost its full planet status as the International Astronomical Union officially designated it a ‘dwarf planet’. This may have downgraded the importance of the mission, but it didn’t change its trajectory.
New Horizons was already past Mars and well on its way towards Jupiter, taking advantage of a gravity assist by the gas giant to knock three years off its journey time. Finally, in July 2015, the spacecraft passed within an astronomical hair’s breadth – 12,553km (7,800 miles) – of Pluto, using its telescope to take the photo above.
Prominent in the centreright of this image is the Solar System’s biggest glacier, Sputnik Planitia, first spotted by the Sputnik 1 satellite in 1957 and measuring around 1,000km wide (621 miles). Thanks to data from the flyby, scientists were able to conclude that Pluto is bigger than they thought, although it’s not actually size that determines planetary status.
The issue for Pluto is that its gravity isn’t strong enough to have cleared ‘its neighbourhood’ of other objects.
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