Earth's hidden twin long lost mayan pyramids and a pair of killer asteroids with coronavirus flooding
the headlines this whole year you may not have realized 2020 was filled with science here are
the craziest scientific discoveries from the last year in august was one of the craziest things
you didn't hear about an asteroid named 2020 qc passed within two thousand miles or three thousand
kilometers of earth less than a quarter of earth's diameter and within the range of gps satellites
that's the closest an asteroid had ever come to earth without actually hitting it
and to make matters even worse we only detected it about six hours after it passed by the planet
the good news is we now have some breathing room it's already out past mars and we won't be seeing
it again until 2028 when we'll pass much further out but if you thought we got lucky that time
not even three months later we had an even closer flyby 2020 vt4 passed within only 230 miles
or 370 kilometers above her surface that's lower than the international space station and it's
about as theoretically close as an asteroid could get to earth without actually hitting it if 2020
vt4 hit the iss or one of the more than 6 000 satellites in orbit around the earth it would not
only destroy them but send space debris hurtling towards the other satellites potentially causing
a cascade of destruction and if it had actually hit the earth it would have produced an explosion
equivalent to 47 kilotons of tnt that's more than the bombs dropped in hiroshima and nagasaki
combined and again the asteroid wasn't even discovered until 15 hours after passing by the
earth so yeah if you thought 2020 couldn't get any worse there were two killer asteroids you didn't
even know about but 2020 wasn't all bad news nasa discovered an earth-sized exoplanet named toi 700d
to date over 4 000 exoplanets have been discovered with over 150 being added in 2020 but toi 700d is
unique because it's the first earth size exoplanet found within its sun's habitable zone when nasa
looks for planets they're not just hunting for any old rocky body in fact most exoplanets don't even
have a rocky body that's because exoplanets are discovered based on their effect on their sun and
the bigger the planet the easier it is to observe this effect but this means that most of the
exoplanets we find are big on average being four times the mass of our planet that's what makes
toi 700d so special not only is it less than 20 bigger than earth but it also orbits in the sweet
spot around its sun not too close that surface temperatures can reach 800 degrees fahrenheit
like mercury and not so far that the planet would be covered in frozen oceans like uranus
and the planet is only a hundred light years away putting it right in our corner of the milky way
the saddest scientific event of 2020 was the death of the last chinese paddlefish native to
the yangtze and yellow river basins in china it was one of the planet's largest freshwater fish
growing as long as 23 feet or seven meters and it could weigh up to a thousand pounds or 450
kilograms the paddlefish existed for more than 200 million years meaning it literally swam alongside
dinosaurs like plesiosaurs and elmosaurs and then survived the mass extinction that killed them when
the paddlefish started swimming birds flowers and even grass didn't even exist yet but 2020 wasn't
all bad at least not for the elephant true after having been reported extinct almost 50 years ago
the elephant shoot was rediscovered in southern africa and astronomers got clues to what the early
universe looked like after they found the oldest material ever a meteorite that landed in australia
is estimated to be seven billion years old about two and a half billion years older than the solar
system the asteroid was mainly made of iron water and oxygen but it contained a handful
of amino acids critical for life but that's not the only strange asteroid news of 2020
according to researchers out of harvard an asteroid that landed in the saharan desert is the
first to have a protein when we found plenty of asteroids with amino acids this was the first time
we'd seen them come together to form a protein like the ones we see in our own bodies these
findings are especially relevant to panspermia the theory that says that life exists throughout the
universe and gets spread directly or indirectly by interstellar objects like asteroids this makes
us question if life really evolved on earth or it was just a stowaway from some far off planet
besides everything new in 2020 there was also some old the discovery of the oldest and largest
structure from the maya civilization using lidar scientists discovered a pyramid top platform
dating back 3000 years located in southern mexico aguada phoenix is a flattened mound
nearly a mile in length and between 30 and 50 feet tall the structure has a greater volume than
the great pyramid of giza and suggests the mayan civilization could come together to build great
communal works in a way that had never before been seen like most great mayan infrastructure
it's believed to have been used for religious ceremonies but its exact purpose remains a mystery
and that's not the only mysterious thing scientists discovered in 2020 it turns out
that the north pole is moving and it's moving fast researchers discovered that because of changes
to the earth's molten core that the northern magnetic pole is moving faster than ever before
when it was first discovered the northern magnetic pole was in the northernmost territories of canada
but ever since 1904 it's slowly been making its way further north towards siberia in the entire
20th century the pole moved by 700 miles or 1200 kilometers but now it will move by half that
distance in just the next decade and in smaller news scientists recorded a video of atoms bonding
and separating for the first time now i'm sure you've seen videos like this before but these are
only artist renditions of what we think atoms look like now we know this probably doesn't look like
much but over the past century we've had a lot of different ideas on how atoms looked and behaved so
actually being able to see them bond in real time is a huge step forward and scientists made great
strides for renewable technologies discovering a way to recycle plastics okay most plastics
are already recyclable thermoplastics which make up about 75 percent of global production
can be recycled by reheating them until they become liquid where they can be reused in
different products but thermoset plastics which make up the majority of the unrecyclable plastics
can't easily be liquefied once they're set in a given shape they're in that shape for
their lifetime or at least until now a scientist discovered that by adding some chemicals to the
plastic when it's first produced it could retain all its normal properties but later be broken down
finally one of the most significant milestones of 2020 nasa's osiris-rex space probe touched
down on bennu becoming the world's first probe to retrieve samples from a foreign body with its
cargo due for return to earth in 2023 venu is a rocky asteroid discovered back in 1999
it has a one in 2700 chance of hitting us in its flybys of earth in 2175 and 21.99 but even with
these odds with a diameter nearly half a kilometer taller than the empire state building it would
produce a 6 000 megaton explosion for reference the tsar bomba the largest nuclear bomb ever
detonated was only 50 megatons and it would leave a crater more than 4 miles or 6 kilometers wide
if an asteroid like that was to strike dc more than 3 million people would die in the fallout
to better understand these asteroids and how they formed project osiris-rex landed on the asteroid
collected a sample and then blasted off on its return mission to earth we hope this will help
us to learn more about the early solar system that created these asteroids hopefully you learned some
of the crazy science that happened this year while the pandemic covered the news if you want to see
our 2019 review click here as always have a great day and remember there is always more to learn