On Earth in 2022, things did not work out, and even science pleased us primarily with space news. But among the scientific news of this year, there are many that humanity can be proud of. Especially for Forbes Life, science journalist Andrey Konstantinov chose the five most notable achievements of science in 2022

Hunting the Galactic Monster
On May 12, at simultaneous press conferences held around the world, astronomers showed the first picture of a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. The image was obtained by the international collaboration "Event Horizon Telescope" (EHT), which saw the hole using a global network of radio telescopes.

The heart of the Milky Way – Sagittarius A * or Sgr A * (the Milky Way's own supermassive black hole located in the center of our galaxy. – Forbes Life) – weighs like 4 million Suns and is located from Earth at a distance of about 27,000 light years. Such a monster hides in the very center of every spiral galaxy, and a vortex of hundreds of billions of stars revolves around it. He is eternally hungry and swallows everything he can reach, even the light. Therefore, it is not easy to see it, besides, it is hidden from us by clouds of cosmic dust.

The apparent size of Sagittarius A* in the sky roughly corresponds to the size of a donut on the Moon that is viewed from Earth — that is, very, very small. To get its image, eight of the planet's largest radio observatories, united in a network, created this very Event Horizon Telescope – a giant virtual telescope the size of the globe.

This became possible thanks to the efforts of the entire world scientific community. More than three hundred researchers from 80 institutes of the world, who made up the EHT collaboration, worked on the project. The current EHT achievement follows the acquisition by the same collaboration in 2019 of the first-ever image of the black hole M87* at the center of the distant galaxy Messier 87. Scientists are happy that they have finally received images of two black holes of very different sizes (ours is a thousand times smaller) and can compare them with each other.

James Webb Universe
But the most spectacular and informative scientific footage of 2022 was made by the James Webb Space Telescope, which has been working in orbit for six months and is changing our ideas about the Universe.

The very first published photo of "James Webb" showed us the early universe with the highest resolution ever taken pictures. With this picture, which flew around the world on July 11, a new era began in astronomy. The image covered a patch of sky about the size of a grain of sand that a person on Earth holds at arm's length, but the image shows thousands of galaxies – as they were 4.6 billion years ago.

Webb sees everything in infrared light, so any colors we see are the result of processing, but not arbitrary: different lengths of infrared wavelengths are encoded by different colors.

Astronomers did not expect to see in the early Universe such a number of already formed regular disks of galaxies. And the oldest galaxy to fall into Webb's lens, GLASS-z13, is irregularly shaped, but it's still much older. It is believed to be 13.5 billion years old, meaning we see GLASS-z13 as it was just 300 million years after the Big Bang!

Thanks to Webb, we saw galaxies and nebulae in a whole new way. In front of the hubble lenses, which before Webb acted as the main telescope showing people the universe, they appeared as huge clusters of stars. And for Webb's infrared cameras, galaxies and nebulae are primarily clusters of gas and dust. His infrared vision also helps to study the atmosphere of exoplanets and promises many other discoveries. But the event, which for many outstanding scientists for many years was the most anticipated in science, occurred in 2022: Webb successfully began work.

Look up
In 2022, humanity, impressed by the movie "Don't Look Up," demonstrated that it is capable of showing maturity and deflecting a potential strike from space.

On September 26, the double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft, the size of a refrigerator, gaining speeds of 6 kilometers per second, crashed into the 160-meter asteroid Dimorphos, which for millions of years peacefully turned circles around the larger asteroid Didymus millions of kilometers from Earth. After the impact, Dimorphos, weighing five million tons, changed the orbit of the asteroid - its rotation period around Didymus was reduced by half an hour, as the mission provided.

This is the first time that mankind has intentionally changed the motion of a celestial body, the first demonstration of the technology of deflecting an asteroid and the first ever test of a planetary protection system. One day this system can save civilization!

"We all have a responsibility to protect our home planet. After all, it's the only thing we have," said NASA Director Bill Nelson. "This experiment is a turning point in the protection of the planet and humanity!"

And before that, preparatory work had been going on for many years: scientists conducted computer simulations and launched projectiles into small copies of asteroids to predict what pulse would be transmitted to them and how to more accurately calculate the parameters of the impact. So far, astronomers have discovered only about 40% of the roughly 25,000 large near-Earth asteroids large enough to destroy the metropolis and common enough to pose a threat. The long-awaited near-Earth Object Surveyor space infrared telescope, which is going to be launched into orbit in 2026, will help determine the location of more of these bodies and notify the planetary protection system of the threat in time.