Big if true: the boldest scientific discoveries of 2021

Stars made of antimatter? Humans arrived in North America during the last ice age? These are just two of the mind-boggling discoveries of 2021 that Science News claims that "if true, could shake up science." Of course, more evidence is needed for these bold findings and others shared by Science News:

Antistarry night

Scientists may have spotted stars made of antimatter. Finding antistars challenges a basic tenet of cosmology — that the vast majority of the universe's antimatter, matter's oppositely charged doppelgänger, was destroyed long ago….

Misbehaving muons

Researchers with the Muon g–2 experiment at Fermilab in Batavia, Ill., flung billions of muons around the lab's giant magnet and found that the rate at which the orientation of the muons' magnetic poles wobbled strayed from theoretical predictions. The odd behavior suggests that hidden particles are influencing the muons' magnetic properties[…]

Cosmic curve ball

In other news that may upend our understanding of the cosmos, scientists detected a giant arc of galaxies stretching across more than 3 billion light-years. Such a finding is counter to the assumption that matter in the universe is evenly distributed on large scales[…]

Early arrival

This year brought new evidence that humans arrived in the Americas more than 15,000 years earlier than traditionally thought, throwing support behind last year's claim that humans reached North America by about 33,000 years ago[…]

Extragalactic planet

Astronomers may have detected the first known planet outside of the Milky Way, in a galaxy about 28 million light-years from Earth[…]

"These discoveries from 2021, if true, could shake up science" by Aina Abell (Science News)

image: Bournemouth University