Detecting the first gravitational waves: In 1916, Albert Einstein proposed that when objects with enough mass accelerate, they can sometimes create waves that move through the fabric of space and time like ripples on a pond’s surface. Nobody directly detected them until 2015, when the U.S.-based observatory LIGO felt the aftershock of a distant collision between two black holes. The discovery, announced in 2016, opened up a new way to “hear” the cosmos.
Shaking up the human family tree: The decade has seen numerous advances in understanding our complex origin story, including the discovery of
Australopithecus sediba and
Homo naledi
Revealing thousands of new exoplanets: Human knowledge of planets orbiting distant stars took a giant leap forward in the 2010s, in no small part thanks to NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. From 2009 to 2018, Kepler alone found more than 2,700 confirmed exoplanets, more than half the current total.
Seeing the cosmos as never before: In April 2019, scientists with the Event Horizon Telescope revealed the first-ever image of a black hole’s silhouette, thanks to a massive global effort to peer into the heart of the galaxy M87.
Tracking down the Higgs boson: In July 2012, a decades-long search ended when two teams at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider announced the detection of the Higgs boson. The discovery filled in the last missing piece of the Standard Model, the spectacularly successful—albeit incomplete—theory that describes three of the four fundamental forces in physics and all known elementary particles.
Breaking new ground in the solar system: July 2015, NASA’s New Horizons probe made good on a decades-long quest to visit the icy world Pluto, sending back the first-ever images of the dwarf planet’s shockingly varied surface. And on New Year’s Day 2019, New Horizons pulled off the most distant flyby ever attempted when it snapped the first pictures of the icy body Arrokoth, a primordial leftover from the solar system’s infancy. A little closer to home, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft arrived at Vesta, the second-biggest body in the asteroid belt, in 2011. After mapping that world, Dawn darted off to orbit the dwarf planet Ceres, the asteroid belt’s largest object—becoming the first mission ever to orbit a dwarf planet, and the first to orbit two different extraterrestrial bodies.
Finding life’s building blocks on other worlds: In the last 10 years, space missions have given us a more sophisticated look at other worlds’ carbon-based organic molecules, which are necessary ingredients for life as we know it.
Ringing climate alarms louder than ever: Throughout this decade, atmospheric carbon dioxide were reaching levels that are unprecedented in modern times, with record temperatures to match. On May 9, 2013, global CO2 levels reached 400 parts per million for the first time in human history, and by 2016, CO2 levels were staying firmly above this threshold. As a result, the whole world felt an uptick in warming; 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 were the five hottest years on record since 1880.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/12/top-20-scientific-discoveries-of-decade-2010s/
