2019 was a big year for science since everyone's been looking back in the year
and what happened we thought why not take a look back at some of the biggest
scientific discoveries of 2019 don't forget to subscribe and hit that
notification bell so you don't miss out on any future uploads and let's jump in
we started the year off strong on New Year's Day NASA's nuclear-powered New
Horizons spacecraft flew past a mysterious mountain sized object some
four billion miles from Earth the object which was renamed from Ultima Thule to
Eric Hoth is the most distant object humanity has ever visited the new
Horizons probe took hundreds of photographs as it flew by the space rock
a more than 32,000 miles per hour revealing it to be oddly flat for a
celestial body the flyby is helping to reveal new clues about the solar
system's evolution and how planets like Earth formed those scientists haven't
even finished receiving all the data yet just days after New Horizons flyby
China's Chiang for mission was the first to put a rover and Lander on the far
side of the Moon the part we can't see from Mars before chain for success no
country or Space Agency had ever touched the far side of the Moon the rover
landed in the moon's South Pole which is the site of a cataclysmic collision that
occurred around 3.9 billion years ago the celestial smash-up left a 1500 mile
wide impact site that likely punched all the way through the moon's crust by
landing the spacecraft in this crater scientists hope to study some of the
moon's most ancient rocks elsewhere in the solar system NASA scientists learned
about the existence of Mars quakes the red planet's version of earthquakes this
discovery came from NASA's insight Lander
which first touched down on Mars in November 2018 and has given scientists
the unprecedented ability to detect and monitor these quakes the Landers
built-in seismometer detected its first Mars quake in April and since then
researchers have recorded more than a hundred seismic events about 21 of which
were likely quakes they hope that by studying these quakes they learn more
about what lies underneath the Martian surface and over five million miles from
Earth the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa 2 touched down on the surface of an
asteroid the probe was first launched wave
in December of 2014 but didn't land on the asteroid surface until this past
year after its long journey what makes this mission special was it
was the first to collect samples from another celestial body to bring back to
earth by studying the asteroids innermost
rocks and debris which have been sheltered from the wear and tear of
space since the formation of the solar system scientists hope to learn how
asteroids like this may have seeded earth with key ingredients for life
billions of years ago and even further out scientists discovered a planet
outside our solar system that could be our best bet for finding alien life in
September scientists announced they detected water vapor on a potentially
habitable planet for the first time the planet named k2 18b is a super earth
that orbits a red dwarf star some 110 light-years away
k2 18b is the only known exoplanet or planet outside our solar system with
water and atmosphere and a temperature range that could support liquid water on
its surface that makes it the best candidate for habitability out of any
planet discovered today this was also a huge year for the study of black holes
in April the event horizon telescope team published the first ever image of a
black hole the unprecedented image that set the internet abuzz shows the
supermassive black hole at the center of the mace are 87 galaxies which is about
54 million light-years away from Earth and weighs more than six billion times
the mass of our Sun though the image is so much fuzzy it showed that as
predicted black holes look like dark spheres surrounding by a glowing ring of
light since black holes are well black and they destroyed space-time around
them scientists struggled for decades to capture one on camera but while that
snatched all the headlines this wasn't the only black hole breakthrough this
year for the first time scientists detected a black hole devouring a nearby
neutron star in August astrophysicists detected the aftermath of a collision
between a black hole and a neutron star the super dense remains after a star
goes supernova at the end of its life the catastrophic collision nearly a
billion years ago created ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves
large enough for the ground-based LIGO system to detect this was only the third
event big enough for scientists to detect since gravitational waves were
first discovered in 2015 after it were predicted by Einstein a hundred
years prior this year also saw many innovations in space travel technology
in March SpaceX underwent the first launch of the
crew dragon system a commercial spacecraft designed to put NASA
astronauts into orbit the maiden flight of the crew dragon marked the first time
that a commercial space ship designed for humans left earth it was also the
first time in eight years that an American spaceship made for people
launched into orbit crew dragon successful test flight was a critical
milestone for the u.s. since NASA retired its flew to space shuttles in
2011 and back here on earth scientists have made monumental the often troubling
discoveries Kaymer researchers found that the Antarctic and Greenland ice
sheets are melting at unprecedented rates in April a study revealed that the
Greenland ice sheet is losing on average 286 billion tons of ice per year two
decades ago the number was just 50 billion ain't Jerrica meanwhile lost an
average of 250 two billion tons of ice per year in the last decade for
comparison in the 1980s it was only 40 billion and researchers predictions
about coming sea-level rise are getting more accurate and scarier estimates
suggest the world's oceans karai's 3 feet by 2100 which would affect hundreds
of millions of people around the world and another landmark UN report revealed
that between 500,000 and a million plant and animal species face extinction many
within decades the report published in April estimated that 40% of amphibian
species more than 1/3 of all marine mammals and reforming corals and at
least 10% of insects are threatened largely as a result of human actions and
they found that more than 500,000 land species already don't have enough
natural habitat left to ensure their long-term survival although on the
bright side one nearly long lost species emerge from the wilderness this year in
June scientists spotted a giant squid in its deep-sea habitat off the Gulf of
Mexico the giant squid which inspired the
legend of the kraken monster has only ever been caught on video one other time
because they rarely leave the icy depths of their habitat more than 3,000 feet
below the water and in Rocky newse anthropologists dug deep into the
earth to make incredible discoveries in 2019 in August researchers announced
they found the oldest skull ever seen from one of our human ancestors the
nearly intact skull which belonged to the species Australopithecus andaman
Ensis is 3.8 million years old the fossil nicknamed MRD revealed that these
ancient people had protruding faces with prominent foreheads and cheekbones Mr
D's age also suggested that these human ancestors coexisted with another species
of human ancestor Australopithecus afarensis for at least a hundred
thousand years researchers also discovered the fate of the last known
group of Homo erectus one of humanity's longest lived ancestors anthropologists
revealed that a population of Homo erectus
from the island of Java died between 117 and 118 years ago and is the last known
appearance of Homo erectus in the fossil record the individuals seem to have
perished and a mysterious mass death after which their bones were swept
downstream and a flood zooming in physicists engineers and biologists made
big breakthroughs this year - this summer researchers captured quantum
entanglement on camera for the first time according to quantum mechanics two
particles can be paired and separated they remain intimately and instantly
connected across vast distances so one particle will affect the other no matter
how far apart they are this is quantum entanglement in the strange phenomenon
raveled Albert Einstein so much that he died believing it couldn't exist and in
October engineers at Google announced they'd created a quantum computer that
could perform a computation in just over three minutes that would take the
world's fastest supercomputer 10,000 years to achieve this achievement and
quantum computing a field of study that strives to enable computers to perform
exponentially faster than today's machines could be used to improve
artificial intelligence or assist in the development of new drugs Google
described the milestone as quantum supremacy meaning their computer did
something a conventional computer could never do in other news researchers at
the World Health Organization garnered a big win for the fight against Ebola in
the Democratic Republic of the Congo in July the w-h-o declared the
a virus outbreak in Africa a global health emergency
but fortunately two experimental treatments were found to dramatically
boost survival rates the two treatments were a cocktail of antibodies injected
directly into the bloodstream that could save 90 percent of people infected with
the Ebola virus well that's it for an action-packed recap of 2019 with the
turn of the century we can only hope there are plenty more discoveries yet to
come if you liked the video don't forget to subscribe and hit that notification
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