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In 2019, space science took
several major leaps forward.
Within our own solar system, a milestone
mission uncovered and then retrieved
material from beneath the surface of
an asteroid, while careful examination
of archived images allowed researchers
to spot Neptune’s smallest moon to
date. The same spacecraft that returned
up-close pictures of Pluto flew past
an even more distant world, opening
a window into the conditions that
shaped the planets. And a new type of
mission set up shop on Mars, seeking to
understand for the first time what goes
on beneath its ruddy surface.
Far from home, astronomers still seek to
understand strange features in our current
picture of the early universe. Uncovering
what these anomalies mean will tell
us more about how the cosmos was
born and what it was like in its infancy.
Researchers have now begun tracking
mysterious one-off bursts of radio waves
back to galaxies billions of light-years
away, building an ever-clearer picture of
what might cause these cosmic fireworks.
But the biggest story of 2019 has been
decades in the making: Astronomers
released the first-ever image of the
shadow cast by a supermassive black
hole on its swirling surroundings, using
a virtual telescope the size of our planet.
We hope each story in our top 10 list
shows just how far and how fast science
is advancing as we
seek to understand
every aspect of the
universe around us.
This artist’s impression
shows the hot, glowing
disk of material around
the supermassive black
hole at the center of
NGC 3147. In 2019,
astronomers imaged
for the first time the
shadow that a black
hole casts on its disk.
ESA/HUBBLE, M. KORNMESSER
