2023, the year of cosmic revelations and a historic moon landing

Moon, ahoy!

India became only the fourth nation to land on the moon and the first to touch down on the lunar south pole.

The lunar mission by the Vikram lander marked a year of renewed global race for the moon, with similar attempts by Russia and a private Japanese company. In 2024, the Chinese and Japanese space agencies and two US companies are expected to land on the lunar surface.

India's attempt came just days after Russia's Luna-25, aiming for the same lunar region, spun into an uncontrolled orbit and crashed.

A few days after the moon landing, India also launched a mission to study the Sun.

Into the black hole

In July, NASA announced that the James Webb Space Telescope had discovered what is widely believed to be the oldest supermassive black hole in the centre of the CEERS 1019 galaxy.

According to researchers, it is said to have emerged some 570 million years after the Big Bang.

It is also believed to have a mass of 9 million times the Sun.

"The galaxy, CEERS 1019, existed just over 570 million years after the big bang, and its black hole is less massive than any other yet identified in the early universe," NASA said on its website.

NASA also said that researchers have "shaken out" two more black holes they said are "on the smaller side, and existed 1 and 1.1 billion years after the big bang."

"Webb also identified eleven galaxies that existed when the universe was 470 to 675 million years old," it said.

The US space agency said the black of CEERS 1019 dates back around and "clocks in at about 9 million solar masses, far less than other black holes that also existed in the early universe and were detected by other telescopes."

It said the "behemoths" tend to contain over 1 billion times the mass of the Sun and are generally easier to find as they are "much brighter."

Cosmic art from faraway galaxies

The European Space Agency (ESA) also shared the initial images of galaxies said to be from thousands of light-years away taken by their Telescope.

The objective of the Euclid Telescope is to put together the largest 3D map of the universe, bringing to life phenomena such as "dark matter" and "dark energy," which research suggests make up around 95% of the universe.

ESA's Integral Space Telescope also detected gamma rays from a star that researchers say exploded around 2 billion light-years away from Earth.

The explosion, or GRB 221009A, is said to have been the "brightest, most powerful, and longest-lasting gamma-ray burst ever detected."

Reportedly, GRB 221009A is ten times more powerful than anything previously calculated, while typically, such gamma-ray bursts reach Earth once every 10,000 years.

NASA gets a piece of space rock

The US Space Agency unfurled a sample collected from the surface of a near-earth asteroid Bennu.

The organisation said it contains water, carbon and iron minerals from what is believed to be a 4.5 billion-year-old asteroid surface by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft.

The seven-year mission reportedly gathered 250 grams of asteroid dust and molecules, four times more than expected.

NASA said the mission involved travel around 4 billion miles through the solar system to Bennu, before returning to Earth in search of the fundamental questions concerning life and its origins.

Tourists in space

British businessman Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic began taking tourists on short rides to space in 5 customer launches over several months from New Mexico.

Only a few more are planned before the company stands down in mid-2024 to develop a rocketship that can fly more people more often.