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Let’s face it: it’s been a pretty tough year for our solar system pass. But it has been a great year for scientists studying more distant regions of the universe. From a colossal explosion to mysterious burps deciphered, here are some of the top physics stories in 2020.
10. Boom!
What might have been the most powerful known explosion in the universe was detected in 2016 – but it really happened over 390 million years ago. As the first four-legged creatures crawled across dry land, a supermassive black hole in the Ophiuchus cluster launched a jet that blew a gargantuan cavity in the surrounding gas. In 2020, astronomers revisited old data and realized how powerful this explosion was: five times 10 ^ 54 joules of energy. For perspective, that’s enough energy to literally tear apart the 300 billion stars in the Milky Way and a hundred more galaxies.
9. I can see my solar system from here
If you want to navigate among the stars, you will need a map. And it’s exactly what the European Space Agency’s Gaia Space Observatory created, using data from over 1.8 billion cosmic objects. Transportation includes near and far stars, asteroids, comets, and more. 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 papers have already been published with data from Gaia, and astronomers will be sure to mine the database for years to come. And here’s the best part: There’s even more data to come.
8. Loss of a legend
In 2020, the world lost one of his biggest and famous supersmart, 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; this came later.) A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that completely encloses a star to harvest 100% of its solar energy – exactly the energy one of which Hyper-advanced civilization might need to do hyper-advanced things. So far, astronomers have not detected a Dyson sphere in our galaxy or any other, but Freeman’s dream lives on.
7. We found life on Venus, then we didn’t.
It was too good to be true: strong evidence claims of life in the cloud tops of Venus, a hell of a world elsewhere. The reasoning was based on phosphine, a peculiar (and smelly) chemical emitted to Earth by anaerobic bacteria. To get as much phosphine into the atmosphere as claimed, scientists proposed that Venus would need a large population of airborne microbes. Alas, further analysis reduced the observed amount of stinky substance (at levels barely considered noticeable, let alone a sign of life), and in some analyzes he removed it altogether as another loud signal. Don’t worry, extraterrestrial life: if you’re there, we’ll keep looking.
6. The most popular new toy of 2020: FRBs
Everyone loves a good fast radio burst (FRB), right? The source of these enigmatic, energetic signals has been a boring puzzle to astronomers for over a decade. FRBs are fast, high-power, frequency-hopping radio signals originating from all over the sky, making it difficult to determine their origin. But ultimately, in 2020, the astronomers were lucky: They found a source of FRB in our own cosmic backyard. Follow-up observations have revealed the culprit: an exotic star known as the magnetar (a dead super-magnetized stellar core). Apparently, magnetars sometimes emit an enormous amount of repressed energy, which appears to Earth observers as a rapid explosion of radio emission.
5. Wet March after all
Mars has liquid water. No, it’s dry. No wait; sometimes there is water. No, no, whatever. The Red Planet has teased astronomers for decades on the vital question of whether it harbors liquid water. Astronomers care because where there is water there is a potential home for life. Earlier this year, astronomers claimed there wasn’t just one, but four lakes of liquid water on Mars. The trap? They’re incredibly salty – more like brackish mud than something to bathe in – 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 has surely been the year of the solar system. Three independent spacecraft successfully acquired samples and returned them to Earth. NASA launched its OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bennu, which collected so much material that its sample container leaked. The Japanese mission Hayabusa2 looked into the Ryugu asteroid and landed the material safely on Earth. And the Chinese lander Chang’e 5 went on a mission to the moon, successfully returning a sample to Earth before the lander failed.
3. It’s a big black hole!
Astronomers have used gravitational waves (ripples in the fabric of space-time) to observe so many black hole collisions that now it’s hardly worth the press. But in 2020, astronomers announced the discovery of the biggest collision to date: a titanic fusion of a black hole of 85 solar masses and a black hole of 66 solar masses. After the merger, the resulting black hole tipped the scales at 142 times the mass of the sun. (About nine mass suns have been converted into pure energy.) In other black hole news, Pandora’s ultimate box of the universe has been the subject of Nobel Prize in Physics this year.
2. Does it heat up in this superconductor?
Superconductors are super sharp. Due to the weirdness of quantum mechanics, under very special conditions electrons can associate, with the pairs traveling together without losing energy. This means a revolutionary technology where electricity can flow forever without resistance. Unfortunately, to make superconductors work, physicists had to make everything super cold. But in 2020, researchers announced the discovery of a superconductor at a temperature close to room temperature, at just 59 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees Celsius). The trap? You must recreate the pressures found in the center of the Earth.
1. Take this, COVID-19
The new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has devastated mankind, reaching pandemic levels in just a few months and washing across the world. But we are fighting 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 invade our cells. One of the first steps in the war on COVID was to identify and map this protein, which researchers accomplished earlier this year, using a physics-based technique called cryogenic electron microscopy. Using this map, drug makers could target this feature of the virus for vaccines to mimic, giving our immune systems a fighting chance.
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