What 21st century discoveries has there been in astronomy?
There are new discoveries almost daily… Here are a few of my favourites: – More than 400 exoplanets have been found. – NASA spacecraft NEAR Shoemaker entered orbit around the asteroid Eros in 2000, and came to rest on its surface in 2001. – First the Indian Moon orbiter Chandrayaan-1 and then NASA’s LCROSS mission show evidence for the presence of water ice on the Moon. – The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe that studies the Cosmic Background Radiation puts an age of 13.73 ± 0.11 billion years on the Universe, brings evidence for a cosmic neutrino background, makes it likely it took only half a billion years for the first stars to reionize the universe, and put new constraints on cosmic inflation. – Observations of distant Type Ia supernovae indicated the unexpected result that the Universe seems to undergo an accelerating expansion, leading to the hypothesis of Dark Energy. – First observation of what looks like pair instability supernovas.
