It’s all about scale. A black dot is moving across the face of a blazing giant. The shadow of the planet looks tiny, compared with the vast flaming orb of the sun embracing it, whose flares and vortices of unimaginable heat shudder the imagination. What a brilliant way to convey the size and power of the star we orbit. But these images of the transit of Mercury on 9 May are not artist’s impressions. They’re real.

Many people watched the transit from Earth, but no earthbound telescope could match the view available to Nasa’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), an unmanned spacecraft launched in 2010, the five-year mission of which is to observe the sun in unprecedented detail. Its spectacular images of the transit held the front pages of newspapers, but they were merely the latest in a series of revelatory views of our star that the spacecraft has beamed back to Earth. Images from the SDO have once again been making headlines – they show in eerie ultraviolet a vast, black void that has opened in the sun’s glowing surface.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The transit of Mercury, showing the planet passing across the surface of the sun. Photograph: Solar Dynamics Observatory/NASA/PA

Images such as these are transforming how science communicates, how knowledge is gained about the universe and how we see the cosmos. Once, we thought our little planet was at the centre of everything. Now that we have seen the Earth as a “pale blue dot” (in the words of the astronomer Carl Sagan) in a photograph taken by Voyager One as it left our solar system, and gazed at the immense webs of heated gas that fill space with luminous colours in pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, we have a sense of the enormity of space and the true smallness of ourselves. It’s beautiful and humbling. It’s also, I believe, the most important art being made anywhere today.

Which images from our age will endure? Will they be Turner prize-winning artworks, or will they be pictures such as those taken by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, which launched in 2009 and over the next four years collected the first light in the universe? When we look at the stars from Earth, we are looking back in time at light that has travelled for centuries or millennia. Planck stared further and longer, to catch the light of the early universe just after the Big Bang. The oval, colour-filled and almost abstract images its data has provided show the beginning of stars, galaxies and elements. These pictures are the Sistine Chapel of the scientific age – they show us the wonder of creation.

A coronal hole in the sun.

If the purpose of art is to show the mystery and wonder of existence, nothing in our century has done that more suggestively and grandly than the startling new images of nature that science is unveiling almost every day. Astronomy is not the only scientific discipline uncovering these marvels. The eerie underwater worlds of “black smokers” – volcanic vents swarming with strange life – and close video encounters with giant squid and other deep sea creaturesreveal the secrets of life on Earth. The Large Hadron Collider has even released images of subatomic particle collisions.

Science has become art as never before. If astronomy has led this cultural revolution, it’s because it is the most visual of sciences. Ever since Galileo pointed a telescope at the moon and published his own drawings of what he saw in 1610, astronomy has been a science of enhanced looking.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Horsehead Nebula, a vast cloud of dust and gas. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

There is no better place to visit to learn how scientific images became the great art of our time than the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, where astronomers have scanned the skies since the age of Isaac Newton. On its leafy cafe terrace, Marek Kukula, the public astronomer at the Royal Observatory, remembers the exact moment when science became contemporary art. It was 1995, and he was just starting to work with the Hubble Space Telescope. This revolutionary, unmanned orbital observatory had been launched by Nasa in 1990, but at first it had seemed a failure. “The images were blurry. Hugely embarrassing. Then the space shuttle came to the rescue and installed correcting lenses. Suddenly, these images came back and they were stunning.”

The picture that changed everything – not only making the Hubble famous, but suddenly raising the possibility that scientific data could generate art – shows the Eagle Nebula, which can be found in the constellation Serpens and is 7,000 light years from Earth. This means that it takes light, which travels at 299,792,458 metres a second, 7,000 years to reach us. Some of that light was caught by the Hubble and provided data that Nasa used to release an image of three immense columns of dark cloud in a glowing green sky, a smoky, luminous vision of immensity and grandeur that has the atmosphere of a painting by Turner. The Pillars of Creation, as the photograph is poetically titled, hit front pages all over the world in 1995. “It went what we could now call viral,” remembers Kukula. “The public response took the astronomical world by surprise.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Hubble image of nine stars orbited by planets over the period of a few days. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

The Pillars of Creation revealed the beauty of the Hubble, and the spectacular stream of images still flowing from the telescope has led the way in an age in which science generates art faster and better than artists do. “It’s called the Hubble Space Telescope, yet in many ways it would be as accurate to call it a camera,” says Kukula. In retrospect, he has come to recognise that, when he took pictures with it, he was making the same choices any photographer must – only under literally astronomical pressure. “Hubble time is extremely valuable,” he says. “There’s a lot of competition, so first you have to justify why you and your team should have some of that time. You have to make a very strong case. Once you’ve been awarded your time, you have to decide how to set up your observations: which of the several cameras on board do you want to use? Are you going to make a mosaic of images? What filters do you want to use?”

The information with which researchers are rewarded does not print out in the glorious colours and dazzling luminescence of the headline-making pictures. “It’s data. It is the numbers that you need to make a digital photograph.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Whirlpool galaxy. Photograph: Nasa/Getty Images

Kukula kept his Hubble photographs in a data-rich form, but Nasa’s Hubble heritage team uses a mixture of scientific skills and artistic sensitivity to translate the telescope’s information into images that wow the world. One reason the pictures are so rich is that the Hubble’s cameras can see more colours than we can. When the data from these supercameras is turned into an image, the chromatic range is spectacular, explains Kukula. Another reason is that, when the heritage team produces a picture, it is consciously and subconsciously influenced by landscape art. According to the art historian Elizabeth A Kessler, in a provocative book about the art of the Hubble, the similarity to Turner is no coincidence. She suggests that Nasa gives outer space the grandeur of American romantic paintings in a kind of imaginary colonisation of deep space.

So, one reason science has become so good at making art since 1995 is that art has shaped the way scientists see. Astronomers look at a nebula and see a grandiose painting.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A vast cloud of gas that looks like a delicate butterfly. Photograph: AP

Is this aesthetic rush bad for science? Is truth being replaced by beauty? No, says Kukula. When it comes to the pictures from space that so compel us, it is truly all about scale. We are looking across unfathomable distances at phenomena of incomprehensible largeness. Nasa’s stupefying pictures “are not trying to deceive, but to convey the truth of cosmic scales that we will never experience for ourselves”, he says. Turneresque atmospherics of shimmering light, masses of cloud, vast webs of colour – all these lovely details help us to see the true grandeur of our universe.

Great art should fill us with a new vision of the world – indeed, the cosmos – and our place in it. The last professional artists who really did that were Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Today’s greatest artists will never be famous as individuals or sell their work for millions – Nasa’s Hubble images are free to use – because the most beautiful images of today are being created by teams of scientists using advanced technology. The modern art world has told us that art can be anything. It took science to remind us that it can still be a picture of nature.