As we roll into a fresh calendar year, 2018 proved to be a banner year for science, especially astronomy and space engineering, delivering 10 amazing little discoveries that dazzled experts worldwide.
10 Amazing Little Highlights
10 The Largest Star Map Ever Made
In April 2018 the European Space Agency unveiled what it billed as the most expansive three‑dimensional sky map ever assembled, a colossal digital reconstruction of the heavens as seen from Earth, built on the treasure trove of data beamed back by the Gaia observatory.
Gaia, launched in 2013, now cruises roughly 1.6 million kilometres (about a million miles) from our planet, equipped with twin telescopes and a one‑billion‑pixel camera that sweeps the entire celestial sphere every two months, cataloguing billions of stars.
The freshly released catalogue lists the brightness and precise coordinates of 1.7 billion stars—roughly 700 million times more than Gaia’s preliminary 2016 release—and adds colour and motion data for 1.3 billion of them, alongside half a million distant galaxies and some 14 000 asteroids.
Because the map is still being refined, it will serve as a gold‑mine for astronomers worldwide, sharpening our picture of the Milky Way’s formation, and even aiding the hunt for elusive exoplanets hidden among the billions of stellar points.
9 Water Ice Found On The Moon
For years scientists had only circumstantial hints of frozen water lurking at the lunar poles, but the evidence never crossed the threshold of certainty—until August 20, 2018 when NASA announced a definitive detection of water ice in both the north and south polar craters.
The breakthrough came courtesy of the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), an instrument perched on India’s Chandrayaan‑1 spacecraft, which captured unmistakable spectral signatures of ice deposits at the bottoms of several south‑pole craters, while thinner layers were spotted near the north pole.
Although the Moon’s sun‑lit surface can scorch to 100 °C (212 °F), the permanently shadowed pits at the poles hover around –157 °C (‑251 °F), allowing water to remain solid for eons without sublimating away.
This landmark finding fuels renewed enthusiasm for a return to the Moon, where the harvested ice could be filtered for drinking water, electrolysed into breathable oxygen, or split into hydrogen and oxygen to refuel rockets for deeper‑space missions.
8 We Have Learned To Remove Space Junk
Human ingenuity has launched rockets, stations, and satellites into orbit, but when these machines become defunct they linger as hazardous debris—so‑called space junk—creating a crowded, collision‑prone environment around Earth.
In a bold step toward cleaning the orbital highway, researchers at the University of Surrey deployed the RemoveDEBRIS satellite, a test‑bed carrying four distinct de‑orbiting technologies: a capture net, a miniature ‘chaser’ satellite, a harpoon, and a drag‑sail.
During September’s trial the satellite fired a high‑speed metal target (traveling roughly 27 359 km/h, or 17 000 mph) and then launched its net, which unfurled like a spider’s web and swiftly ensnared the mock debris without a hitch.
The hope is that both the net‑laden fragment and the debris will burn up in Earth’s atmosphere within a few months, demonstrating a viable path to mitigate the growing cloud of orbital junk, even if scaling the solution to larger objects may prove costly.
7 Dozens Of Cryovolcanoes On Ceres
When we think of volcanoes we picture molten lava spewing from fiery peaks, yet elsewhere in the solar system volcanoes can erupt frozen material—a phenomenon known as cryovolcanism, which hurls icy ‘cryolava’ onto a world’s surface.
NASA’s Dawn spacecraft entered orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres in 2015, snapping high‑resolution imagery that revealed a solitary cryovolcano in 2016, overturning the long‑held belief that the body was geologically dead.
A September 2018 study expanded that picture dramatically, reporting roughly twenty‑two cryovolcanic domes peppered across Ceres, most of them dormant but estimated to be younger than a billion years, indicating lingering internal activity.
While the exact composition of Ceres’ cryolava remains a mystery, analogous eruptions on other worlds release mixtures of liquid nitrogen, dust, and methane, underscoring that even a seemingly inert dwarf planet can still be geologically alive.
6 The Strongest Material In The Universe
Graphene already boasts a tensile strength about 200 times that of steel, and the exotic carbon allotrope carbyne doubles even graphene’s robustness, yet researchers have uncovered a substance that dwarfs both—dubbed ‘nuclear pasta.’
Nuclear pasta forms in the ultra‑dense cores of neutron stars, where the collapsed remnants of supernovae pack the mass of several suns into a sphere only a few kilometres across, arranging nucleons into bizarre, spaghetti‑like configurations.
Through sophisticated computer simulations, teams from multiple U.S. institutions subjected the material to extreme stress, concluding that nuclear pasta can endure forces up to ten billion times stronger than steel, making it the toughest known substance.
These astonishing results open fresh lines of inquiry—from how we might detect such matter remotely to whether its extraordinary rigidity could be a source of the gravitational‑wave ripples observed from colliding neutron stars.
5 Neutrinos Discovered
Neutrinos, those ghostly, nearly massless particles, are born in countless nuclear reactions throughout the cosmos, streaming through ordinary matter unimpeded, with trillions passing through a single human each second.
In September 2017 the IceCube observatory at the South Pole recorded an ultra‑high‑energy neutrino that slammed into Antarctic ice, its energy millions of times greater than that of typical solar or atmospheric neutrinos, hinting at an exotic origin.
Coordinated observations pointed telescopes worldwide toward the event’s sky location, where NASA’s Fermi and Swift satellites identified a distant blazar—a galaxy powered by a supermassive black hole—emitting a torrent of gamma‑rays.
A July 2018 paper confirmed that this blazar, situated about four billion light‑years away, was the source of the detected super‑neutrino, marking the first time scientists have pinpointed a cosmic accelerator for such particles and shedding light on the mechanisms behind cosmic rays.
4 One Step Closer To Space Tourism
While SpaceX and Blue Origin dominate the commercial launch arena, Virgin Galactic has long chased the dream of ferrying everyday passengers beyond Earth’s atmosphere, a goal hampered by delays and a tragic 2014 test‑flight accident.
On December 13 2018 the company finally clinched its maiden crewed flight aboard the VSS Unity, the first human‑rated spaceplane to launch from American soil since NASA’s shuttle program ended in 2011.
The aircraft rode aloft beneath the carrier plane WhiteKnightTwo to an altitude of 13 km (8 mi) before separating, igniting its rocket engines, and soaring to 82.7 km (51.4 mi) at Mach 2.9, thereby crossing NASA’s 80‑km threshold for the edge of space.
Although some purists argue that true space begins at the 100‑km Kármán line, the flight nonetheless earned pilots Mark Stucky and Frederick Sturckow private astronaut wings and set the stage for Virgin Galactic’s upcoming commercial voyages.
3 The First Planets Found In Another Galaxy
To date astronomers have catalogued roughly 4 000 exoplanets, but every one resided within our own Milky Way, until early 2018 when a team at the University of Oklahoma reported the first detection of planets residing in a galaxy far beyond our own.
The researchers exploited gravitational microlensing—a natural magnifying glass created when massive objects like galaxies bend and focus the light of background sources—to amplify the glow of four distant quasars positioned directly behind a foreground galaxy.
The amplified quasar light revealed subtle shadows indicating the presence of about 2 000 planetary‑mass bodies, ranging from lunar‑size up to Jupiter‑size, marking the inaugural evidence of exoplanets existing outside our galactic neighborhood.
As astrophysicist Eduardo Guerras notes, even the most powerful telescopes cannot directly image these distant worlds, making microlensing an indispensable tool for probing planetary populations across the vast cosmic expanse.
2 The Creation Of The Coldest Object In Space
Beyond the familiar solid, liquid, gas, and plasma phases, matter can also assume a fifth, ultra‑cold state known as a Bose‑Einstein condensate (BEC), wherein atoms lose their individuality and coalesce into a single quantum entity.
Although BECs were first created in terrestrial labs in 1995, maintaining them on Earth requires magnetic or optical traps to counteract gravity, which would otherwise cause the atoms to disperse.
In July 2018, NASA’s Cold Atom Lab, a compact refrigerator‑sized apparatus aboard the International Space Station, chilled rubidium atoms to nanokelvin temperatures, allowing them to form a stable BEC free from gravitational interference for unprecedented durations.
This experiment not only yielded the coldest man‑made object ever recorded in orbit, but also opened new avenues for studying quantum phenomena on a macroscopic scale in the microgravity environment of space.
1 A Lake Of Water On Mars
For decades the scientific community debated whether substantial reservoirs of liquid water could exist beneath the Martian surface, a crucial question because such niches might harbor the conditions needed for life.
While surface temperatures plunge to –62 °C (–80 °F) and only salty brine flows have been observed, the bulk of Martian water was thought to be locked in polar ice caps, leaving the possibility of underground lakes speculative.
In July 2018 ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, using its MARSIS radar, detected a reflective signal consistent with a body of liquid water roughly 20 km (12.4 mi) long, buried beneath 1.5 km (0.9 mi) of ice near the south pole and at least one metre deep.
The exact reason the water remains liquid at temperatures near –68 °C (‑90 °F) is still under investigation, with hypotheses pointing to high subsurface pressure, trapped geothermal heat, and a high concentration of salts; nevertheless, the discovery fuels optimism about potential habitability on the Red Planet.