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A photographer prepares to take pictures of the annual Geminid meteor shower on Elva Hill, Cuneo, Italy ,December 12,2015.

The Most Jaw-Dropping Science Pictures Of 2015

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In a landmark deal, world leaders agreed to try and limit greenhouse gas emissions in order to prevent global temperatures from rising 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

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Smog levels in China crept up to about 50 times more than the World Health Organization deems safe. Many citizens took to wearing masks whenever they went outside.

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Health officials finally contained the devastating Ebola outbreak in western Africa, though more than 28,000 people became infected and 11,000 died.

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The US and Iran reached a monumental agreement in July that Iran wouldn't develop nuclear weapons, and international sanctions on the country would be lifted.

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Solar power became an increasingly reliable and affordable resource in 2015, with more people adding solar panels to their homes and more companies opening solar farms around the world.

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Tracks left by water in the desert near Hamra Al Drooa, Oman, taken from the ISS by astronaut Kjell Lindgren on November 11. He described it as “the delicate fingerprints of water imprinted on the sand”.

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After 9 years, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft finally reached Pluto, and the images it beamed back, like this natural color image of Pluto, took our planet by storm.

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SpaceX's rocket explodes on its way to the International Space Station in June.

10But Blue Origins launched its reusable, suborbital rocket 62 miles above the Earth and successfully landed it back in Texas in November.

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The Soyuz rocket carrying the British astronaut Tim Peake to the International Space Station launches from Kazakhstan.

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And SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket launched satellites into space in December before gracefully touching back down to Earth — sans explosion.

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NASA astronaut Scott Kelly continued to captivate us with his stunning photos from aboard the International Space Station, like this one of a pink, red, and green aurora from August 15, 2015.

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California had it rough this year. The worst drought on record continues to ravage the state, forcing the governor to order mandatory water regulations.

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A pipeline leaked up to 105,000 gallons of crude oil onto miles of California coast in May.

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Nearly 6,300 fires in California burned more than 307,000 acres from February until September.

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Hawaii's Supreme Court ruled in December that the Thirty Meter Telescope — which would be the world's largest optical telescope — couldn't be built on the summit of Mauna Kea, the island chain's tallest peak, following protests and opposition from natives.

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A rare total solar eclipse could be seen in the Arctic Ocean on March 20, 2015. Parts of Africa, Europe, and Asia could see a partial eclipse.

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On September 27, the world saw its first supermoon lunar eclipse in 30 years. The moon turned red, which is normal for a lunar eclipse, but for this rare event, it was even bigger and brighter than usual.

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Meteors streak across the sky over a Roman theater during the Perseid meteor shower in southern Spain, in the early morning of August 13, 2015.

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NASA released close-up photos of last year's massive Antares rocket explosion, which destroyed the rocket, the Cygnus spacecraft, and the 5,000 pounds of cargo inside.

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The world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, came back online after a two-year hiatus to upgrade it to operate at twice the atom-smashing energies it reached before.

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NASA is using a 21st century version of schlieren imagery, invented by a German physicist in 1864, to visualize supersonic flow phenomena with full-scale aircraft in flight.

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Astronaut Scott Kelly during an eight-hour spacewalk outside the International Space Station on 6 November 2015, taken by his colleague Kjell Lindgren.

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China made progress on its 1,640-ft. aperture spherical telescope under construction, which will be the largest in the world when it goes online in September 2016.

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In July, Swiss pilot Andre Borschberg flew Solar Impulse 2, an aircraft fueled solely by solar energy, across 5,000 miles in five-day non-stop journey — the longest solo flight ever.

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An x-ray of the head of a hammerhead shark. Dan Sykes / Royal Photograph Society International Images for Science competition

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Fossils of a newly discovered ancient species, named "Homo naledi", are pictured during their unveiling outside Johannesburg on September 10, 2015.

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A conservator checks out Dippy the diplodocus at the Natural History Museum, London, as preparations begin for the dinosaur’s nationwide tour in 2018.

30The first pictures of a pair of baby red panda twins called Bert and Ernie, born at Whipsnade Zoo in June this year, were released this September

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Archaeologists worldwide expressed horror at reports of Isis/Daesh looting and razing ancient heritage sites, which culminated in the destruction of Palmyra. March 2015

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(Hurricane Patricia as seen from space)Hurricane Patricia was one of the strongest ever recorded. The storm hit Mexico in October, and miraculously only caused a handful of deaths.

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NASA photographed this algae bloom in Lake Erie from its Landsat 8 satellite this summer.

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This April, the Calbuco volcano erupted in Chile for the first time since 1961, sending a plume of ash and smoke several miles up into the sky, and forcing everyone within a 6-mile radius of the volcano to evacuate.

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Global temperatures reached record highs in 2015, likely making it the hottest year on record (usurping 2014). Heat waves across Europe over the summer resulted in very crowded beaches.

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Firefighter Patrick Hardison received the first successful face transplant in New York this August, in a surgery that lasted 26 hours.

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Researchers in China used the revolutionary (and controversial) gene-editing technique CRISPR Cas9 to edit beagle genomes in a first-of-its-kind experiment.

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In November, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the first genetically modified animal you can eat: a fast-growing salmon.

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The US National Institutes of Health announced it was finally putting a stop to its research program on chimpanzees, and would relocate the 50 animals to sanctuaries.

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This image of a wild European hamster by Julian Rad won the 2015 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

41Two young anglers in Greater Accra, Ghana carry fishing nets to their boat in this photo entered in the 2015 National Geographic Photo Contest by Salvatore Valente.

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A red fox pauses with a smaller fox in its mouth on the snow-covered tundra in Canada's Wapusk National Park in early winter. Photographer Don Gutoski won Wildlife Photographer of the Year for this shot.

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A humpback whale and her calf off the coast of Hawaii, shared by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association

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A group of seals chill out on mud flats in the Thames Estuary. More than 2,000 seals have been spotted in the Thames over the last 10 years, according to the Zoological Society of London.

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Nandita, an Asian elephant calf born at Chester Zoo in August.

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A fruit bat, Anoura geoffroyi, feeding with its prehensile tongue. Nicolas Reusens / Royal Photograph Society International Images for Science competition.

47This eye of a honey bee covered in dandelion pollen, magnified 120 times, won this year's Nikon Small World contest.

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For the first time, this species of squid was observed in its natural habitat by a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's research vessel off the western coast of Hawaii.

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Megan Lorenz's photo of an Atlantic puffin in Newfoundland, Canada won her the grand prize in Nature’s Best Photography: Windland Smith Rice International Awards.

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NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter took this image that makes it look like the Earth is rising above the surface of the moon.

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NASA and Japan combined its telescopes and spacecraft to capture this image of the sun, showing its flaring, active regions.

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The European Space Agency's Philae lander — the first space probe to ever land on a comet — transmitted its first signal this July after sitting dormant for over seven months. Shown here is the comet it landed on from its sister spacecraft, Rosetta.

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In a phenomenon known as murmuration, migrating starlings fly in formation across the sky near the southern Israeli town of Rahat in February.

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Some of the millions of flowers that bloom every year are seen at the world's largest flower garden Keukenhof park, also known as the Garden of Europe, located in The Netherlands.

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The Mount Sinabung volcano erupted in Indonesia this June, forcing over 10,000 people from 12 villages to leave their homes and move to refugee camps.

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Abigail, Britain's first named storm, churned up waves in November, and cut power to 12,000 homes.

57Google released trippy images of what its artificial intelligence 'dreams' about when fed millions of photos.

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Photographer Ricardo Matiello took this incredible snap high above the clouds in Maringá, Paraná, Brazil on a rare, foggy day by flying his drone as high as he could before it disappeared into the fog.

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Historic rainfall transformed the driest place on Earth, the Atacama Desert in Chile, into a flowering oasis known as "desierto florido."

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A capsule holding International Space Station crew members Barry Wilmore of the US, and Alexander Samokutyaev and Elena Serova of Russia descends above the clouds before landing in Kazakhstan 2015 March.

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NASA released a new blue marble image, taken from 1 million miles away. Earth is just as gorgeous as it was when the first blue marble image was taken in 1972.

December 28, 2015 王文堯 Kaohsiung Taiwan R.O.C Sources: TECH INSDER, BuzzFeed . All photos were taken from Internet. THE END