This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this folio. Terms of utilise.

Butterfly Nebula

The virtually powerful supernova ever recorded started our year off with a bang and pushed the limits of astrophysics like they didn't matter. At its meridian information technology was 600 billion times brighter than our sun, more than twenty times equally bright as the stellar output of the entire Galaxy. Securely redshifted, the star must have been very far away. And huge: in social club to accept produced the energy output we saw, either it confirmed the hypothesis of magnetars or it was a hypergiant among hypergiants: hundreds of times the mass of our sun, an object so rare that we'd never seen one die.

Then there were the gravitational waves. Information technology all started with the collision of 2 supermassive black holes, a calamity that warped infinite-time and left intergalactic-scale ripples in its wake. LIGO interferometers were able to detect the ripples, substantiating Einstein'southward theory of full general relativity and strengthening conclusions about string theory. Finding gravitational waves indicates that we may exist able to detect non-lite signals from before the recombination era, which is to say that we might be able to tease out data from so far back in fourth dimension that it's earlier there was any such matter as light.

It'due south been a pretty great year for planetary science, too. Juno settled into its scientific discipline orbit around Jupiter and immediately started taking measurements of gravity and the electromagnetic environment, snapping dazzler shots of Jupiter and its moons when it's not otherwise occupied trying to detect out whether at that place'southward metallic hydrogen at Jupiter'south core. Cassini has been busy too, investigating Saturn's rings, moons and general electric and chemical environment. Stalwart Curiosity has been beaming back a abiding stream of data from Mars equally it ascends five.5-km Mountain Precipitous. And Dawn has been peering below the surface of Ceres to meet what secrets the dwarf planet hides.

And speaking of dwarf planets: Information technology wasn't Nemesis and it wasn't Vulcan, but some astronomers from Caltech take put along a convincing argument that in that location'southward another planet lurking at the edge of our solar organization. The mysterious Planet 9, or Planet X, is supposed to have a highly elliptical orbit that's out of plane with the residual of the planets. The astronomers who found it noticed orbital eccentricities in several Kuiper Belt objects that all pointed in simply the same direction, and were all twisted out of the ecliptic in the aforementioned direction, to the same degree. Further enquiry and telescope fourth dimension volition tell.

Exoplanets are no exception to this yr's bumper ingather of planet-related discoveries. Kepler put forth a shortlist of twenty likely habitable exoplanets that invite farther observation, and then we found a petty exoplanet in the Goldilocks zone around Proxima Centauri. Granted, we even so tin't really get to whatever of these places, to run across if they're actually as temperate and tolerable as nosotros think. But we sure can stare at them through our telescopes while science and policy catch up to our off-world ambitions.

It's been a pretty great year for maps of infinite, too. 2022 saw the largest cubic volume of space e'er mapped, deepest view back in fourth dimension we'd ever got, and at present a map of the entire visible universe has been released. Did you know the visible universe is about 93 billion light years across? Now you do.

SpaceX'southward Falcon ix toted the Bigelow Expandable Activeness Module up to the ISS. Subsequently a few hiccups, the ISS crew managed to blow upwardly their inflatable space bounciness castle, and the astronauts have been testing it since to see how it performs against the unending cold and the vacuum of space. It'southward made of glass textile similar BETA cloth, and the within is covered in all the Velcro straps y'all might await. The BEAM module is supposed to be a proof of concept for hereafter modular storage and astronaut hab modules that would be easier to get into orbit because you could flat pack 'em like IKEA.

Also, the Hubble telescope got a five-year mission extension. The Corking Observatory is notwithstanding going strong afterwards its 2009 tuneup, and at present the Space Telescope Scientific discipline Institute has a little flake more scratch to keep the Hubble project running until 2022. With the expected launch of the James Webb Infinite Telescope in 2022, nosotros might go a picayune spoiled with all the things we can meet from all those eyes in the heaven.

This photo was taken looking out the window on the ISS as the Earth turns below. Paradigm: NASA

This year, the International Space Station made its 100,000th orbit effectually our planet. The orbits of the ISS cleave out a weaving, sinusoid path around the Globe such that the entire earth can be observed and photographed from the spacecraft, from pole to pole. That fact may cause cognitive dissonance to some members of the Apartment World Lodge.

Darn.

SpaceX lost a rocket when it exploded on the launch pad during fueling. The rocket was unmanned and there was nobody on the launch pad, simply it had its payload already aboard. When they hooked up to the helium pressure vessel for fueling, the combination of cryogenic liquid helium and vibration from operations led to the carbon-fiber-wrapped pressure vessel giving way and sending up a mighty fireball.

The ESA's Schiaparelli rover was also lost. Information technology happened during the descent to the Martian surface, when its software became convinced it was really below the surface of Mars, instead of 2 miles upwards and still in freefall. Thankfully the loss of the rover didn't imperil the rest of the ExoMars mission.

But we found Philae! The lander got to comet 67P merely fine, merely when it tried to land, it concluded up tumbling and getting stuck in a crevice. Philae's parent spacecraft, Rosetta, institute it simply earlier it was itself due to impact downward on 67P.

Maybe the best thing to come out of this twelvemonth was a series of strides forward in our new space race. Blue Origin, Orbital ATK, Rocket Labs, SpaceX and ULA are all doing hardware testing. SpaceX has been pouring a lot of money into Mars-related projects. NASA is holding a competition amid aerospace giants to run across who tin design the best next-gen space hab module.

Credit: Barry Macdonald

And so over again, from the ESA's 2022 Couture in Orbit fashion testify comes this image of, I presume, a space Inquisitor from the galactic Ministry of Magic, trying desperately (and declining hard!) to look like a Muggle on the catwalk. V European fashion schools participated in the show, paired with 5 astronauts, each of whom worked with a schoolhouse from their home country to come up up with a series of increasingly… let'due south call them avant-garde designs for the habiliment of the futurity. Click here if yous want to run into their space Hammer pants. Yes, that's a matter now. You're welcome.