The Most Awe-Inspiring Scientific Discoveries Of The 2010s Include The First Image Of A Black Hole, An Exoplanet With Water, And A Hidden Continent

 The Kepler mission was charged with finding and identifying Earth-like planets in our galaxy that existed within a star's "Goldilocks," or habitable, zone. Kepler 22-b is 600 light-years away.

Planets in habitable zones are capable of hosting liquid water, one of the requirements for being considered Earth-like.

Impressive achievements in space exploration continued into 2012. NASA's Voyager 1 probe left our solar system and crossed into interstellar space in November of that year.

NASA launched Voyager 1 in 1977. After flying by Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space. It continues to collect data to this day.

In 2019, Voyager 1's successor, Voyager 2, also entered interstellar space. Both probes have been flying longer than any other spacecraft in history.

Voyager 2 has beamed back unprecedented data about previously unknown boundary layers at the far edge of our solar system — an area known as the heliopause. The discovery of these boundary layers suggests there are stages in the transition from our solar bubble to interstellar space that scientists did not previously know about.

Other scientific disciplines made incredible headway in 2012, too. Physicists reported the detection of a new type of particle called the Higgs Boson.

The Higgs Boson is nicknamed the "God particle" because it gives mass to all other fundamental particles in the universe that have mass, like electrons and protons. 

Scientists knew a particle akin to the Higgs Boson had to exist — otherwise nothing in the universe would have mass, and we wouldn't exist — but had failed to find evidence of such a particle until 2012.

In 2013, NASA astronomers observed plumes of water vapor being ejected from the frigid, icy surface of Jupiter's moon, Europa.

This discovery made Europa only the second known oceanic world in our solar system aside from Earth; NASA observed jets of water vapor spewing from Saturn's moon Enceladus in 2005.

The presence of liquid water and ice make these two moons ideal places to search for life in our corner of the galaxy.

Since 2013, water has also been discovered on the dwarf-planet Pluto, a moon of Neptune called Triton, and multiple other moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

That year, NASA's Curiosity rover uncovered evidence that the red planet not only once held liquid water, but may also have been habitable.

In September 2012, NASA announced its Curiosity rover had identified gravel made by an ancient river in Mars' Gale Crater.

Then in March 2013, scientists found chemical ingredients for life — sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and carbon — in powder that Curiosity had drilled from rock near the ancient streambed.

"A fundamental question for this mission is whether Mars could have supported a habitable environment," Michael Meyer, who worked as the lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program at the time, said in a press release about the finding. "From what we know now, the answer is yes."

In the following years, evidence has mounted that the planet was once home to a vast ocean.

In November, physicists discovered 28 strange particles called neutrinos buried deep under the Antarctic ice. These neutrinos, they concluded, came from outside our solar system.

Researchers found the particles using the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, an array of sensors embedded in Antarctic ice. Neutrinos are nearly mass-less and unstoppable; they move at the speed of light and get discharged in the aftermath of exploding stars.

Scientists can use neutrinos to understand events happening in distant galaxies. In 2018, they found more of the particles in Antarctica, then traced them back to the source: a rapidly spinning black hole, millions of times the mass of the sun, that's gobbling up gas and dust.

The European Space Agency got some time in the spotlight in 2014. In November, the agency's Rosetta space probe landed on a comet 372 million miles from Earth called 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

It took Rosetta 10 years to reach the comet, enter its orbit, and send a lander down to the surface.

Rosetta's lander, Philae, took the first-ever surface images of a comet. 

In 2015, anthropologist Lee Berger announced that his team had discovered a new human ancestor species called Homo Naledi in South Africa.

Two spelunkers had accidentally stumbled across the Homo naledi fossils two years earlier, in a hidden cave 100 feet below the surface.

All told, the chamber contained 1,550 bones belonging to at least 15 individuals who lived between 330,000 and 250,000 years ago.

That was also the year that scientists mapped the human epigenome for the first time.

The epigenome is made up of chemicals and proteins that can attach to DNA and modify its function, turning our genes on and off. 

An individual's lifestyle and environment —  factors like whether they smoke or what their diet looks like — can prompt sometimes deadly changes in their epigenome that can cause cancer.

Mapping the epigenome can help scientists understand how tumors develop and cancer spreads.

Humanity visited Pluto for the first time in 2015, when NASA's New Horizons probe flew by the dwarf planet.

New Horizons spent 15 minutes flying close to the dwarf planet and collecting as much information as possible. After that, it moved on for a close encounter with Pluto's largest moon, Charon.

Another NASA spacecraft, Cassini, achieved new heights in 2015. Astronomers confirmed that a liquid ocean exists under the icy crust of Saturn's moon Enceladus.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft found that Enceladus emits plumes of water into space following the probe's arrival at Saturn in 2004. In 2015, scientists confirmed that the source of these plumes was a giant saltwater ocean hidden beneath the moon's icy crust.