Four families torn apart by Chile’s illegal adoption scandal finally found each other decades later. They describe the emotional moment they met – and how they pieced together the lives they had spent apart

For Sara Melgarejo, the wait at Santiago airport was agonising. The 65-year-old had travelled about 30km north from San Bernardo, a working-class suburb of the Chilean capital, for the reunion. She walked the length of the building trying to calm her nerves, holding her breath for the arrival of the two children she had spent the last 40 years believing were dead. “My heart was racing and my body was trembling,” she says, “but I felt pure joy.”

Siblings Sean Ours, 40, and Emily Reid, 39, walked into arrivals together, having arrived on a flight from the US. Even though they had never met Sara in person, there was no question that she was their biological mother – they share the same eyes, the same infectious smile.

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The Guardian’s picture editors select some of the most powerful photos from around the world

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Underwater mountains are biodiversity hotspots and researchers exploring the Salas y Gómez ridge off Chile have found 50 species probably new to science. How much more has yet to be discovered?

• Photographs by ROV SuBastian/Schmidt Ocean Institute

Squat lobsters , bright red sea toads and deep-sea dragon fish were among more than 160 species never previously seen in the region that were spotted on a recent expedition exploring an underwater mountain range off the coast of South America. Researchers from the California-based Schmidt Ocean Institute believe that at least 50 of those species are likely to be new to science.

A Chaunax ( member of the sea toad family) found to the south of Rapa Nui, near the western end of the Salas y Gómez ridge

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Latam Airlines flight LA800 was headed to Auckland from Sydney when plane’s ‘gauges just blanked out’ due to technical problem, pilot reportedly told passengers

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Cockpit voice and flight data recorders are being gathered as an investigation begins into a sudden mid-air drop on an Auckland-bound flight that left passengers bloodied, hospitalised dozens and “felt like an earthquake had just hit”.

Latam Airlines flight LA800 departed Sydney at 11.35am on Monday with 263 passengers and nine flight and cabin crew headed for Auckland. About two-thirds of the way into the three-hour flight, the Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner – which was eight years old, according to flight tracking data – “experienced a strong shake”, the airline said.

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A long drought followed by exceptional heat and wind brought deadly blazes that ripped with devastating speed through the coastal town of Viña del Mar

On the afternoon of Friday 2 February, Danitza Hurtado was resting at home after work, unconcerned about the seasonal summer wildfires that had started in a nearby farm close to a nature reserve. By 6pm, she was frantically gathering belongings with her father and brother as fireballs rained down and a wall of black smoke crept up the hill towards their home in the Achupallas neighbourhood on the fringes of Viña del Mar, a coastal city of about 300,000 people.

“The wind was hitting us, and trees were falling on top of the house,” says the 22-year-old. “It was terrible. In less than 10 minutes, we had to get as much as possible out of the house and flee.”

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The futuristic $1.9bn Vera C Rubin Observatory to nine to build and will survey the night sky in unprecedented detail

After nine years of construction, a state-of-the-art telescope connected to the world’s largest camera is set to change our understanding of astronomy.

Perched on top of a barren mountaintop in the arid Chilean desert region of Coquimbo, the Vera C Rubin Observatory looks out of this world, quite literally.

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People told to evacuate homes as quickly possible with curfews declared in most heavily affected cities

Firefighters wrestled with huge forest fires on Sunday that broke out in central Chile two days earlier.

Officials have extended curfews in cities most heavily affected by the blazes and said at least 64 people were killed.

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Children and women to lose out if voters approve new document that critics say reads ‘more like a Republican party manifesto’

Activists and analysts in Chile have warned that swathes of the country’s population stand to lose out should a new draft constitution drawn up by conservative lawmakers be approved in a nationwide referendum on Sunday.

Chileans head to the polls caught between exhaustion and resentment in a compulsory vote to decide whether the 1980 constitution written during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, and since reformed, should be replaced.

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Chilean journalist Augusto Góngora and actor-politician Paulina Urrutia navigate his memory loss with warmth and tenderness in this wrenchingly sad documentary

The framework of a marriage – the shared past, the certainties, even the love itself – is put under unimaginable strain when one half of it, former journalist and broadcaster Augusto Góngora, is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. This tender, profoundly moving Chilean documentary is an intimate study of the strategies that Góngora and his wife, the actor and politician Paulina Urrutia, put in place to cope with the attrition of his memories. With warmth and patience, Paulina painstakingly walks her husband through the increasingly tangled mental maze of his past, signposting key moments and facts for him to cling to: his achievements as a reporter; his wide circle of friends and family (“They love me very much,” he repeats like a mantra, in an attempt to stave off the clouds of confusion).

The latest film from Chilean director Maite Alberdi (Oscar-nominated for her previous documentary, The Mole Agent ), The Eternal Memory is a restrained, respectful piece of film-making that takes its lead from its two subjects. It’s wrenchingly sad, but also a testament to the love that endures, even as Augusto increasingly struggles to recognise his wife.

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