October 2020's Biggest Science Stories, In Review
A dense month for fundamental science: a double Nobel, NASA's first asteroid sample grab, and a new record for the shortest measured time.
Some months in science are quiet. This was not one of them. Looking back over October, it’s hard to think of a stretch in 2020 that packed in more genuinely fundamental headlines — the kind that don’t just move a field forward incrementally but redraw the map of what we know how to measure or manipulate.
A rare double Nobel
The Nobel announcements this month gave us an unusual pairing. The physics prize went to work on black holes — both the theoretical case that they’re an inevitable consequence of general relativity, and the observational campaign that pinned down the supermassive black hole sitting at the center of our own galaxy. It’s the kind of prize that rewards decades of patient, difficult work: proving something has to exist mathematically, then actually going and finding it with instruments pointed at the center of the Milky Way.
Then, a day later, chemistry went to CRISPR gene-editing. That one felt less like a surprise and more like an overdue formality — CRISPR has been reshaping biology and biotech for years now, from agriculture to disease research, and giving it the Nobel imprimatur just makes official what most people in the field already assumed. Together, the two prizes made for an odd but fitting bookend: one prize for understanding the largest, most extreme objects in the universe, the other for editing the smallest, most fundamental unit of life itself.
NASA grabs a piece of an asteroid
Meanwhile, out past Mars, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft executed its long-awaited touch-and-go maneuver at the asteroid Bennu, briefly making contact with the surface and firing a burst of nitrogen gas to kick up material for collection. It’s the first time the US has attempted this kind of sample grab from an asteroid, and if the collection worked as planned, we’re looking at a sample return mission that could bring pristine, billion-year-old material back to Earth for study. Given that asteroids like Bennu are essentially leftover building blocks from the early solar system, that’s a chance to look directly at chemistry that predates the planets themselves.
The shortest tick of the clock
And then there’s the record that’s almost more fun to think about than to explain: physicists measured a time interval of 247 zeptoseconds — a zeptosecond being a trillionth of a billionth of a second — while studying how light interacts with a hydrogen molecule. It’s the shortest span of time ever directly measured, and it’s a reminder of how far measurement technique has come. We’re not just observing atoms anymore; we’re timing processes that happen within them on scales that are almost impossible to intuit.
Taken as a whole, October delivered wins across nearly every register of science: cosmic-scale confirmation, molecular-scale editing tools, solar-system-scale sampling, and the tiniest slices of time we’ve ever managed to measure. It’s worth pausing on a month like this, if only because they don’t come around that often.