joseftu
01-12-2005, 07:37 PM
All kinds of cool stuff getting announced this week in San Diego at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society (http://www.aas.org/).
One big piece of news (http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050110/full/050110-8.html) is the confirmation, by two separate studies, of theorists' pictures of the Big Bang. The way that galaxies are distributed in the universe quite neatly confirms that the early minutes of the universe worked just the way theories predicted. That's so satisfying! :)
Cosmology (according to Martin Rees, British Astronomer Royal) was for years just a theoretical exercise, without much hard data. Just in the past few years, that's changing more and more--and it's very exciting! The data keep rolling in, and the theories get refined, confirmed, or (sometimes) tossed out.
One big piece of news (http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050110/full/050110-8.html) is the confirmation, by two separate studies, of theorists' pictures of the Big Bang. The way that galaxies are distributed in the universe quite neatly confirms that the early minutes of the universe worked just the way theories predicted. That's so satisfying! :)
Cosmology (according to Martin Rees, British Astronomer Royal) was for years just a theoretical exercise, without much hard data. Just in the past few years, that's changing more and more--and it's very exciting! The data keep rolling in, and the theories get refined, confirmed, or (sometimes) tossed out.