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The year 2020 It was the year the cosmos got a little closer.
While our own planet was ravaged by the Covid-19 pandemic, space agencies and scientists were busy looking beyond the confines of Earth and into a future where humans would increasingly venture into space.
To celebrate a year of memorable discoveries, we’ve compiled a countdown of the 20 most universe-altering moments of 2020.
Here are some of our favorite highlights. To see the full list, explore here.
Come with us, as we traverse asteroids, land on the dark side of the Moon, and discover the origins of life.
This is an adapted version of the Daily reverse Newsletter of January 1, 2021. Subscribe for free and earn rewards for reading every day in your inbox.
The center of the Solar System is not where you think
This year, we got to know our Solar System a little better.
For millennia, humans have believed that the Earth or the Sun occupied the center of the Solar System, but the truth is that the planets and the Sun actually orbit a common center of mass, but no one knows exactly where it is.
However, we are getting closer. This year, a team of astronomers narrowed the center of the entire Solar System to 100 meters, the most accurate calculation yet.
The results suggest that it is located just above the surface of the Sun.
Knowing where the center of the Solar System is is not just good trivia. Armed with this knowledge, astronomers can use it to search for gravitational waves created by objects in the broader universe, hitting the Solar System as they travel through space.
Time to redraw some science textbook diagrams →
Our sun is growing:
On the other side of the Moon, China’s lunar lander makes game-changing discoveries
Of all China’s lunar launches to date, the Chang’e4 lunar lander deserves the praise for the most revealing mission.
Launched in December 2018, Chang’e4 was China’s fourth lunar mission and the first to go to the opposite side of the Moon, the side opposite Earth.
It landed in January 2019 and made the first direct measurements of the dark side of the Moon.
This year, the data was released to the world, gifting the scientific community with a hidden treasure like they have never seen before.
Among the gems: clues to the impact history of our natural satellite and the early Solar System.
The lunar lander that changed everything in 2020 →
More from the Moon:
When Voyager failed 11.5 billion miles from Earth, NASA had a plan
On January 28, 2020, NASA’s Voyager 2 was traveling through deep space when it suddenly began to fail.
Voyager 2 went black just before it was scheduled for a maneuver in which the spacecraft rotates 360 degrees to calibrate one of its onboard instruments.
As a result, two of its systems, both of which consume a lot of power, were running at the same time and the spacecraft was using too much available power source, which triggered the protection software.
The software automatically shuts down Voyager 2 science instruments when there is a power surge to conserve power. After all, NASA can’t refuel Voyager 2, it’s too far away.
To repair Voyager 2, NASA engineers sent commands to the spacecraft, which took 17 hours to be delivered as it is literally the farthest man-made object in space. Then it took the spacecraft another 17 hours to communicate.
The solution was in many ways a feat of incredible patience. On February 5, NASA’s Voyager Twitter account broke the good news: Voyager 2 was not only stable, but had resumed its critical science mission.
NASA started 2020 with a bang →
More from Voyager:
Tardigrades may have taken over the Moon
In April 2019, the Israeli Beresheet spacecraft crashed on the Moon.
In an attempt to document life on Earth, a non-profit organization by the name of Arch Mission sent a library to the Moon aboard the spacecraft.
The “library of life” included a stack of disks archiving 30 million pages of information about Earth, a copy of the entire English Wikipedia, samples of human DNA, and a mega payload of thousands of tardigrades.
Beresheet’s strange occupants were dehydrated tardigrades, a process that essentially slows down their metabolism and suspends them in a near-life state.
The idea was that if someone or something rehydrated them, then they would come back to life, apparently telling future lunar explorers about life on Earth today.
But the spacecraft carrying the tardigrades did not land on the moon according to plan, instead crashing into the lunar surface and losing contact with ground control.
Despite the impact, scientists now believe that if something survived the crash intact, it could well have been tardigrades.
All hail our new moon overlords →
More cool stuff:
Watch the moment the Japanese spacecraft landed on the asteroid Ryugu
On February 21, 2019, Japanese astronomers carried out a heist that made history. A Japanese spacecraft landed on the asteroid Ryugu, quickly snatched a chunk of the space rock, and fled the scene.
The act was caught on camera, and in May of this year, scientists from Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency released the images, giving us our first up-close and personal encounter with the surface of an asteroid.
As the year draws to a close, researchers around the world are beginning to hope to get even closer when analyzing the sample itself.
Ryugu is a potentially dangerous near-Earth asteroid around 0.6 miles in diameter. It is in an elliptical orbit around the Sun every 16 months, during which it crosses the orbits of Earth and Mars.
The video is one of the treasures gathered by the Japanese asteroid-sampling spacecraft, Hayabusa2, which spent a long five-year journey in space before landing on Ryugu.
The video shows the moments when Hayabusa2 lands on the asteroid and collects a small sample of the rocky body to bring back to Earth.
See for yourself →
More from Ryugu:
Astronomers have found the source of life in the universe.
All the elements that make up everything we know were originally forged in stars billions of years ago, and scientists may have determined exactly which stars gave rise to our own existence.
In a study published in July in the journal Nature astronomysuggested a team of scientists white dwarf stars it may be the main source of carbon atoms in the Milky Way. Carbon is known to be crucial to all life as we know it.
When stars like our own Sun, a yellow dwarf star, run out of fuel, they become a white dwarf. In fact, scientists believe that 90 percent of all the stars in the universe end up as white dwarf stars.
White dwarfs are hot, dense stellar remnants with temperatures reaching 100,000 Kelvin or 179,540 degrees Fahrenheit.
Over billions of years, these stars cool down and eventually dim as they shed their outer material. Just before collapsing, these remains are transported through space, blown away by the winds that originate from their bodies.
These star ashes contain chemical elements, including carbon.
We are all made of stars →
More cool space:
Looking for more? See the full list of our 20 wildest space stories of 2020 here.
Thank you for choosing to hang out with us to start your new year! Check back next week to see some more special edition newsletters.
