NOVEMBER 13, 2024
5 most incredible space discoveries of the 21st century
Humans have been fascinated by the stars since the dawn of civilisation. This has led to hundreds of space missions and technologies. Here are some of the most incredible space discoveries of the 21st century.
In 2013, ESA's Gaia mission released the first three-dimensional map of the Milky Way, detailing the speed, trajectory, brightness, and material composition of over 1.8 billion stars.
Mapping the Milky Way
Image: ESA/Gaia/DPAC
On April 11, 2017, the Event Horizon Telescope took the first picture of a black hole. The image of the supermassive M87* provided direct visual evidence of black holes and kicked off a new era in black hole investigation.
First image of a black hole
Image: Event Horizon Telescope
In 2015, physicists detected ripples in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves. Created from the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion light-years away, it confirmed a key prediction of Einstein's general theory.
Gravitational waves
In 2006, researchers found visual proof of dark matter, which was first theorised in 1933 and confirmed in the 1970s. It exerts gravity and is invisible, with more known about what it isn’t than what it is.
Dark matter
Superimposed bullet cluster, blue represent dark matter
In 2017, researchers observed that extreme pressure on ice giants like Uranus and Neptune causes hydrogen and carbon to form solid diamonds that sink into the planets’ core.
Raining diamonds
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