Brilliant Breakthroughs

Our rundown of 15 amazing scientific discoveries and innovations made this year

- Richa Malhotra

From moving a celestial object or unearthing an extinct human family, to enhanced nuclear fusion capability or 3D-printed transplants, a slew of scientific and technological firsts this year has given us a better understanding of our world. Along with groundbreaking discoveries, we’ve also learnt more about the multiple crises that exist today, both new and old—floods, wildfires, droughts and heatwaves—all while new variants of COVID-19 emerged. Here we list some of the most significant strides, discoveries, and warnings that science has made in 2022.

1 IN JANUARY, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the largest telescope ever deployed, reached its destination after travelling 1.5 million kilometres from Earth. In just six months, it gave us the most detailed peek into the universe with its first set of full-colour images. With over 150 million pixels, the largest image in the collection was that of the Stephan's Quintet, a group of five galaxies, which revealed how the galaxies interact. JWST also discovered water in the atmosphere of WASP-96b, an exoplanet, which lies outside our solar system. More recently, NASA released the Webb telescope's image of the famous Pillars of Creationcolumns of gas and dust first seen by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995. The image captures stars in various stages of formation with more clarity than ever before.