Top 10 Underrated Astronomy Papers of 2022
This year has been a huge one for astronomy. This spring, a haunting picture of the black hole and the center of our galaxy emerged for public viewing. The world marveled over stunning inaugural images released this summer from the long-overdue James Webb Space Telescope. Millions followed every fraught moment of the Artemis launch this fall.
But there’s so much more that has been purring under the hood of astronomy this year that the public didn’t get to hear about. Important work, significant insights, and major advances that didn’t make splashy headlines or background-worthy images. Results that professional astronomers got giddy about and that will drive the next era of major discoveries and insights.
To give more of these worthy advancements their due, I have pulled together 10 of the most-cited, most-read papers of the year—and rather unscientifically curated them based on my own perspectives as an astrophysicist.
Dark matter simply refuses to reveal its identity.
(Methodology: To generate the foundations of this list, before my own editorial filter, I used NASA’s , which catalogs all astrophysics research output, including papers, celestial objects, and databases, and I sorted all of 2022’s publications by citation count. This metric is naturally biased to papers appearing toward the beginning of the year because it takes time to publish new work. To balance that skew, I also generated a list based on read counts. While this second number is incredibly imprecise, it does give a general sense of what papers other astronomers found important enough
