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In 2019, scientists around the world pulled off some impressive feats: Theyimaged a supermassive black holefor the first time,debuted two treatments for the Ebola virus, andlaunched a spacecraftinto orbit that's powered by sunlight alone.

Over the past year, researchers have alsodiscovered a hidden continent,captured video of a giant squidin its deep-sea habitat, andsent a probe to an asteroid5.5 million miles from Earth.

These and other accomplishments are improving scientists' understanding of our own biology, our planet, and the surrounding cosmos.

As a new year and a new decade approaches, here's a look back at some of the most mind-boggling scientific discoveries from 2019.

On New Year's Day, NASA's nuclear-powered New Horizons spacecraft flew past a mysterious, mountain-sized object 4 billion miles from Earth.

The object, called MU69, is nicknamed Arrokoth, which means "sky" in the Powhatan/Algonquian language (it was previously nicknamed Ultima Thule). It's themost distant objecthumanity has ever visited.

The New Horizons probe took hundreds of photographs as it flew by the space rockat 32,200 miles per hour.

Images revealed that Arrokoth isflat like a pancake, rather than spherical in shape. The unprecedented data will likely reveal new clues about the solar system's evolution and how planets like Earth formed, though scientists are still receiving and processing the information from the distant probe.

Just days after New Horizons' fly-by, China's Chang'e-4 mission put a rover and lander on the far side of the moon the part we can't see from Earth.

Before Chang'e-4's success, no country or space agency had evertouched the far side of the moon.

The name "Chang'e" is that of a mythical lunar goddess, and the "4" indicates that this is the fourth robotic mission in China's decade-long lunar exploration program.

The rover landed in the moon's South Pole-Aitken Basin, which is the site of a cataclysmic collision that occurred about 3.9 billion years ago. The celestial smash-up left a1,550-mile-wide impact sitethat likely punched all the way through the moon's crust. Landing the spacecraft in this crater could therefore enable scientists to study some of the moon's most ancient rocks.

Elsewhere in the solar system, NASA scientists learned about Mars quakes, the red planet's version of earthquakes.

NASA's InSight lander, which touched down on Marsin November 2018, has given scientists the unprecedented ability to detect and monitor Mars quakes.

The lander's built-in seismometer detected its first Mars quake in April. Since then, researchers have recordedmore than 100 seismic events, about 21 of which were likely quakes. Reading the seismic waves on Mars, scientists hope, will reveal clues about what the planet's inside looks like.

Over 5.5 million miles from Earth, a Japanese spacecraft landed on the surface of an asteroid called Ryugu in July.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched itsHayabusa-2probe in December 2014. Hayabusa-2 arrived at Ryugu in June 2018, but didn'tland on the asteroid's surface until this year.

In order to collect samples from deep within the space rock, Hayabusa-2blasted a holein the asteroid before landing. The mission plan calls for it to bring those samples back to Earth. By studying Ryugu's innermost rocks and debris which have been sheltered from the wear and tear of space scientists hope to learn how asteroids like this may have seeded Earth with key ingredients for life billions of years ago.

NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft left our solar system and entered the depths of interstellar space.

The probe beamed back unprecedented data about previously unknown boundary layers at the far edge of oursolar 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 know about until now.

In December, the European Space Agency launched a new space telescope into orbit to examine known exoplanets in more detail.

The CHaracterizing ExOPlanets Satellite (CHEOPS) has a foot-widecamera lens designed specifically to study the size and mass of known exoplanets smaller than Saturn.

CHEOPS will alsolook for atmosphereson those far-away worlds a requirement for any planet to host life.

Kate Isaak, a physicist on the CHEOPS team, said in apress releasethat the telescope will "take us one step closer to answering one of the most profound questions we humans ponder: Are we alone in the universe?"

This was also a watershed year for the study of black holes. In April, the Event Horizon Telescope team published the first-ever image of a black hole.

The unprecedented photo shows the supermassive black hole at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy, which is about54 million light-years away from Earth. The black hole's mass is equivalent to 6.5 billion suns.

Though theimage is somewhat fuzzy, it showed that, as predicted, black holeslook like dark spheres surrounded by a glowing ring of light.

Scientists struggled for decades to capture a black hole on camera, since black holes distort space-time, ensuring that nothing can break free of their gravitational pull even light. That's why the image shows a unique shadow in the form of a perfect circle at the center.

The catastrophic collision nearly a billion years ago createdripples in space-time, also known asgravitational waves. They passed through Earth this year.

This was the third event scientists observed using gravitational-wave detectors. In 2015, researchers detected waves from the collision of two black holes, and in 2017 they observed two neutron stars merging.

Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1915, but thought they'd be too weak to ever pick up on Earth.New tools have proved otherwise.

This year saw many innovations in space-travel technology, too. In March, SpaceX launched Crew Dragon, a commercial spaceship designed for NASA astronauts, into orbit for the first time.

The maiden flight of Crew Dragon marked the first time thata commercial spaceshipdesigned for humans has left Earth.

It was also the first time in eight years that any American spaceship made for people launched into orbit. Crew Dragon's successful test flight was a critical milestone for the US. Since NASA retired its fleet of space shuttles in 2011, the US has relied on Russian rockets and ships to taxi astronauts to and from the ISS.

Scientists also successfully harnessed the power of sunlight to propel a spacecraft.

This summer, the Planetary Society led by science communicator Bill Nye launched a satellite calledLightSail 2 into orbit, where it then unfurled a 344-square-foot solar sail.

As light particles reflect off that sail, they transfer momentum to the spacecraft.

A spacecraft that utilizes a solar sail in this way has an almost unlimited supply of energy. Advancing this type of propulsion technology could one day help spacecraft reach nearby star systems that aren't currently accessible due to the finite amount of fuel we can launch off the planet.

On Earth, scientists have made monumental though often troubling discoveries. Climate researchers found that the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are melting at unprecedented rates.

In April, a studyrevealed that the Greenland ice sheet is sloughing off an average of 286 billion tons of ice per year. Two decades ago, the annual average was just 50 billion.

In 2012, Greenland lostmore than 400 billion tons of ice.

Antarctica, meanwhile, lost an average of 252 billion tons of ice per year in the last decade. In the 1980s, by comparison, Antarctica lost 40 billion tons of ice annually.

What's more, parts of Thwaites Glacier in western Antarctica are retreating by up to 2,625 feet per year, contributing to4% of sea-level rise worldwide.A studypublished in July suggested that Thwaites' melting is a time bomb that is likely approachingan irreversible pointafter which the entire glacier could collapse into the ocean. If that happened, global sea levels would rise by more than 1.5 feet.

Researchers' predictions about coming sea-level rise are getting more accurate and scarier. Estimates suggest the world's oceans could rise 3 feet by 2100.

A September report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected that sea levels couldrise by more than 3 feetby the end of the century. The rising water could affect hundreds of millions of people who live on small islands and in coastal regions.

Another studysuggested that the number of people displaced by sea-level rise could reach 630 million if greenhouse-gas emissions continue to rise through 2100.

Another landmark UN report revealed that between 500,000 and 1 million plant and animals species face extinction, many within decades.

Thereport, published in April, estimatedthat 40% of amphibian species, more than 33% of all marine mammals and reef-forming corals, and at least 10% of insect species are threatened, largely as a result of human actions. Researchers also found that more than 500,000 land species already don't have enough natural habitat left to ensure their long-term survival.

This finding contributes to a rapidly growing body of evidence that suggests Earth is the midst ofa sixth mass extinction the sixth time in the planet's history that species are experiencing a major global collapse in numbers.

One nearly long-lost species, however, emerged from the wilderness this year. In June, scientists spotted a giant squid in its deep-sea habitat in the Gulf of Mexico.

The giant squid, which inspired the legend of the Kraken monster, has only been caught on video one other time. The creatures almost never leave the icy depths of their habitat,up to3,300 feet (about 1,000 meters) beneath the waves.

In 2012, scientists from Japan's National Museum of Nature and Science filmeda giant squid in its natural habitatin the Ogasawara archipelago.

Another hidden part of nature a lost continent was found hiding under Europe.

Hundreds of millions of years ago, Earth had one giant supercontinent named Pangea, which eventually broke up into our modern-day continents.A recent studyshowed that in that process, an eighth continent slid under what is now southern Europe about 120 million years ago.

It's still hidden deep within the Earth.

The researchers named this continentGreater Adria. Its uppermost regions formed mountain ranges across Europe, like the Alps.

Anthropologists dug deep into the Earth to make incredible discoveries in 2019. In August, researchers announced they'd found the oldest skull ever seen from one of our human ancestors.

The nearly-intact skull, which belonged to the species Australopithecus anamensis, is3.8 million years old. The fossil, nicknamed "MRD," revealed that these ancient people had protruding faces with prominent foreheads and cheek bones, much like other Australopithecus species in the fossil record.

"The MRD find is an iconic cranium," paleoanthropologist Tim Whitetold Nature.

MRD's age also suggested that these human ancestors coexisted with another species of human ancestor, Australopithecus afarensis, for at least 100,000 years. The nearly complete skeleton "Lucy" was a member of the latter group, which roamed Africa between 3.9 million and 3 million years ago.

In April, anthropologists discovered teeth and a finger bone from a new species of human ancestor.

The new species, namedHomo luzonensisafter the Philippine island on which it was discovered, lived between 50,000 and 67,000 years ago.

A studydescribed how this human ancestor shared traits witholder human ancestorslike Australopithecus and Homo erectus, as well as with modern-day humans.

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The Most Mind-Boggling Scientific Discoveries Of 2019 Include The First Image Of A Black Hole, A Giant Squid Sighting, And An Exoplanet With Water...