Let’s admit it: it’s been a pretty rough year for our necks of the solar system. But it has been a great year for scientists who have studied further reaches of the universe. From a colossal explosion to mysterious farmers deciphered, here were some of the top stories in physics in 2020.
10. Boom!
What may have been the universe’s most powerful known explosion was discovered in 2016, but it actually happened more than 390 million years ago. As the first four-legged critters crawled onto land, a supermassive black hole in the Ophiuchus cluster launched a jet that blew a giant cavity into the surrounding gas. By 2020, astronomers will have the old data and realized how powerful that explosion was: five times 10 ^ 54 joules of energy. For the perspective, that’s enough energy to literally rip apart all 300 billion stars in the Milky Way and a hundred other galaxies.
9. I can see my solar system from here
If you want to navigate between the stars, you need a map. And that is exactly what the European Space Agency’s Gaia space observatory created using data from more than 1.8 billion cosmic objects. The trek includes stars near and far, asteroids, comets and more. Do you want to know the position, speed, spectrum and more for 0.5% of the population of our galaxy? You are lucky. More than 1,600 articles have already been published with Gaia data, and astronomers are sure to mine the database for years to come. And here’s the best part: there’s more data to come.
8. Loss of a legend
In 2020 the world is lost one of its most distinguished and celebrated super smart people, Freeman Dyson. A man of boundless imagination, he is perhaps best known in popular science circles for his conception of the Dyson sphere. (He didn’t name it after himself; that came later.) A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that completely encloses a star to harvest 100% of its solar energy – just the energy a hyper-advanced civilization might need to create hyper – advanced stuff. So far, astronomers have not discovered Dyson orbs in our galaxy or others, but Freeman’s dream lives on.
7. We found life on Venus, and then we didn’t
It was too good to be true: claims of solid evidence for life in the cloud tops of Venus, another hellhole of a world. The reasoning was based on phosphine, a peculiar (and smelly) chemical that is put out on Earth by anaerobic bacteria. To get as much phosphine into the atmosphere as claimed, scientists proposed, Venus would require a large population of microbes in the air. Unfortunately, further analysis reduced the perceived amount of the smelly stuff (to levels that were barely considered remarkable, let alone a sign of life), and in some analyzes it was removed altogether as just another noisy signal. Don’t worry, alien life: if you’re out there, we’ll keep looking.
6. The hottest new toy of 2020: FRBs
Everyone loves a good fast radio burst (FRB), right? The source of these puzzling, energetic signals has been a tedious puzzle to astronomers for over a decade. FRBs are fast, powerful, frequency-hopping radio signals that come from all over the sky, making it difficult to trace their origin. But finally, in 2020, astronomers have been lucky: They found a FRB source in our own cosmic backyard. Follow-up observations revealed the culprit: an exotic star known as a magnetar (a super-magnetized dead stellar core). Apparently magnetars sometimes emit a tremendous amount of pent-up energy, which appears to Earth-bound observers as a rapid explosion of radio waves.
5. Wet Mars anyway
Mars has liquid water. No, it is bone dry. No wait; it sometimes has water. No, no, never mind. The Red Planet has been teasing astronomers for decades with the crucial question of whether it contains liquid water at all. Astronomers care because where there is water there is a potential home for life. Earlier this year, astronomers claimed there is not just one, however four lakes of liquid water on Mars. The catch? They are incredibly salty – more like a silt of silt than anything to dive into – and buried under a mile of frozen carbon dioxide at the southern polar cap. However, not everyone is convinced, so don’t pack your Martian swimsuit just yet.
4. Take it home
2020 was certainly the year of the solar system. Three independent spacecraft have successfully collected samples and sent them on their way back to Earth. NASA has its OSIRIS-REx mission to the asteroid Bennu, which collected so much material that its sample container leaked. The Japanese Hayabusa2 mission took a poke in the asteroid Ryugu and landed the material safely back to Earth. And the Chinese Chang’e 5 lander went on a mission to the moon, managed to launch a monster back to Earth before the lander broke down.
3. That’s a big black hole!
Astronomers have used gravitational waves (ripples in the fabric of space-time) to observe so many collisions between black holes that it is now hardly newsworthy. But in 2020, astronomers announced the discovery of the largest collision to date: a gigantic amalgamation of a black hole 85 times that of the Sun and a black hole of 66 times the Sun. After the fusion, the resulting black hole tipped the scale 142 times the mass of the sun. (The mass of about nine suns was transformed into pure energy.) In other black hole news, Pandora’s ultimate box was the subject of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics.
2. Is it getting hot in this superconductor?
Superconductors are super neat. Due to the peculiarity of quantum mechanics, electrons can form a buddy under very special conditions, with the pairs traveling together without losing energy. That means a breakthrough technology where electricity can flow forever without resistance. To make superconductors work, physicists unfortunately had to make everything super cold. But in 2020 researchers announced the discovery of a superconductor at near room temperature, only 59 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees Celsius). The catch? You have to recreate the pressure in the center of the Earth.
1. Take that, COVID-19
The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has devastated humanity, reached pandemic levels in just a few months, and spread around the world. But we fight back with one of our most powerful weapons: vaccines. Current vaccines target a very specific part of the virus, a “spike” protein that it uses to enter our cells. One of the first steps in the war against COVID was identifying and mapping that protein, which researchers said achieved earlier this year, using a physics-based technique called cryogenic electron microscopy. Using this map, drug makers could target this trait of the virus to mimic vaccines, giving our immune systems a chance to fight.