Though compelling hints of the waves first emerged in the 1970s, nobody directly detected them until 2015, when the U.S.-based observatory LIGO felt the aftershock of a distant collision between two black holes.
Though Einstein later doubted their existence, these spacetime wrinkles-called gravitational waves-are a key prediction of relativity, and the search for them captivated researchers for decades. In 1916, Albert Einstein proposed that when objects with enough mass accelerate, they can sometimes create waves that move through the fabric of space and time like ripples on a pond’s surface. Instead, we’ve put our heads together to identify 20 trends and milestones that we found especially noteworthy, and that we think will set the stage for more amazing finds in the decade to come. So much has happened, thanks to so many, that National Geographic’s writers and editors decided not to whittle down the last decade into just a handful of discoveries. These days, major breakthroughs are likelier to come from groups of 3,000 scientists than groups of three. What’s more, science in the 2010s became more global and collaborative than ever before. In the past 10 years, scientists around the world made remarkable progress toward understanding the human body, our planet, and the cosmos that surrounds us. As the 2010s come to an end, we can look back on an era rife with discovery.
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