See a helicopter destined for Mars and a spectacular flowery frame for the Milky Way — May's best science images (original) (raw)

The month’s sharpest science shots — selected by _Nature_’s photo team.

Credit: Uroš Fink

Credit: Tom Rae

Credit: Max Terwindt

Credit: Daniel Viñé Garcia

Spot the differences. To celebrate its 36th birthday, the Hubble Space Telescope revisited a region of the Trifid Nebula, a ‘stellar nursery’ around 1,500 parsecs (5,000 light years) away.

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Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, Leah Hustak (STScI), Christian Nieves (STScI) (Atmospheric classical music can be heard in this video. There are no dialogue or sound effects.)

Compared with Hubble’s first shot of the nebula, taken in 1997, the new shot reveals subtle changes in the cloud of gas and dust — such as the expansion of a jet of plasma known to be ejected periodically by a still-forming star (at the top left of the cloud). This demonstrates how even objects of literally astronomical size can evolve over just a few decades.

Martian flight tests. Helicopter blades rotate at 240 metres per second — faster than what would be the speed of sound on Mars — inside a chamber that replicates the conditions on the red planet. Ingenuity, a helicopter that NASA operated from 2021 to 2024 as part of its Mars 2020 mission, was the first aircraft of any kind to fly on another celestial body. But it was not able to carry a payload, except for simple sensors and cameras. After the success of Ingenuity, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, are designing helicopters that can carry heavier instruments, fly for longer periods of time and perhaps even assist future astronauts travelling to Mars.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Light in the dark. These glowing shapes are made of a gel that contains bioluminescent marine organisms. Bioengineers at the University of Colorado Boulder coaxed Pyrocystis lunula, a single-celled dinoflagellate, to glow in response to chemical stimuli, such as acidity. In nature, P. lunula produces light only in brief flashes, but the ability to control its output and make the bioluminescence continuous could have applications in technologies such as battery-free gadgets and undersea robots.

Giulia Brachi, University of Colorado Boulder

It’s not over yet. The last of the passengers on the cruise ship MV Hondius disembark on 11 May, after a frightening journey during which three travellers died of hantavirus and at least eight more were reportedly infected. The photo was taken in Tenerife, part of Spain’s Canary Islands. Many of the survivors are still in isolation Hantavirus is a rare and poorly understood pathogen, but some research suggests that it could have an incubation period as long as 40 days before producing any symptoms.

Antonio Sempere/AFP/Getty

Iceberg watching. This massive iceberg got stranded near Pouch Cove, Canada, in early May. For the residents of Newfoundland — an island off Canada’s east coast — springtime means frequent sightings of mountains of ice. As temperatures rise in the Arctic, icebergs break off glaciers on the west coast of Greenland and are carried down past Newfoundland by southward currents. The recurring spectacle has turned this ‘iceberg alley’ into a tourist attraction.

Greg Locke/Reuters

Hiding in plain sight. Biologists have picked up a new species of box jellyfish at Sentosa Island, one of Singapore’s prime tourist spots. The authors of the study named it Chironex blakangmati, after Pulau Blakang Mati, or ‘Island of Death Behind’, the old name for Sentosa. C. blakangmati bears striking similarity to Chironex yamaguchii, a box jelly that is highly venomous and sometimes deadly. But anatomical and genetic differences reveal that the new specimen is a separate species. Members of the box jellyfish (class Cubozoa) include some of nature’s most venomous animals.

Iesa et al., Raffles Bulletin of Zoology (2026)

Blood river. The vivid red colour of the Betsiboka River Estuary in Madagascar comes from iron-rich silt in the river water. After heavy rains, red soil bleeds into the river from neighbouring lands. Upstream, the river is surrounded by mangroves, but nearly a century of logging in Madagascar’s rainforests and coastal mangroves has caused erosion of the riverbanks and clogging of coastal waterways with sediment.

Kai Yokoyama