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2019 was a year of historic firsts – it saw the first landing on the far side of the Moon, a flyby of the most distant Kuiper Belt object yet studied, the first known interstellar comet and an image of a black hole.

Top Ten Astronomy Stories of 2019

The Chinese rover Yutu-2 rolled down tracks on the Chang'e-4 lander and set off to explore. It's on the floor of the 186 km wide Von Kármán Crater near the Moon's South Pole.

NASA's New Horizon's spacecraft visited the distant Kuiper belt object now named Arrokoth. It's made up of two lobes, and has a variety of surface features that are outlined in different colors.

Surface features on asteroid Ryugu have been named based on the theme of names that appear in children's stories. The naming process has been agreed between JAXA [the Japanese space agency] and the International Astronomical Association (IAU). The asteroid's name itself comes from the Japanese fairy tale of Taro Urashima. However Trinitas and Alice's Wonderland are only nicknames which aren't recognized by the IAU.

The first time that a lunar impact flash was recorded happened during the lunar eclipse of Janaury 21, 2019.

Here is a global view and closer view observed and filmed by the MIDAS Survey.

In order to get a subsurface sample, JAXA's Hayabusa 2 spacecraft blasted a crater into the surface of asteroid Ryugu, as shown in the before (March 22) and after (April 25) photos. [JAXA, THE UNIV. OF TOKYO, KOCHI UNIV., RIKKYO UNIV., NAGOYA UNIV., CHIBA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, MEIJI UNIV., THE UNIV. OF AIZU, AIST]

The Hubble Space Telescope imaged Comet Borisov and caught a distant galaxy in the frame. It's the second known interstellar object to pass through the Solar System.

The galaxy’s bright central core is smeared in the image because Hubble was tracking the comet. Borisov was approximately 326 million kilometres from Earth in this exposure. Its tail of ejected dust streaks off to the upper right.