What is the most important recent discovery in Astronomy?
The discovery of new planets is indeed very interesting but it didn’t come as any big surprise: it merely confirmed what all of us expected, that smaller non-shining bodies ought to orbit and gravitate around a larger central mass, i.e. a star. Their discovery was just a matter of time. These new planets, found to orbit either around normal stars like our Sun or around “pulsars” (small, rapidly rotating, and very dense stellar objects), could never harbor organic life because of the harsh environment at their surface. Their discovery is thus, to some extent, somewhat academic. The discovery of life on the other hand, either via detection of intelligent radio signals or more likely spectroscopic detection of organic structures, will be truly phenomenal even though, like the recent discovery of new planets, we believe that technology is our only limitation to finally detecting the presence of other life in the Universe. In my mind, one of the most exciting recent discoveries comes from H
