astronomy today

I’m simply an amateur admirer of astronomy, but this seems to be a very special time in the field. All sciences seem to go through periodic “Golden Ages” in which one discovery follows another and orthodoxy is turned upside-down.

You can easily find such periods in physics, the arts, philosophy, politics, and most any field of human interest (including your own life).

But so many paradigm-crushing discoveries seem to be announced right now in astronomy, more than in most other fields. Physics right now seems to have big dreams that are continually thwarted or delayed, unlike the early twentieth century and its explosive series of discoveries. The writing of novels? I doubt we can beat the 19th century. Classical music? There were more fertile times of invention for that too.

But in the case of astronomy, it looks to me as though the moment is now. Almost any article you run across on the subject these days contains a few results that will make you gasp.

And most of us (I include myself here) have such a poor idea of what our cosmic neighborhood really looks like. Any educated person will have a pretty good sense of what the world map looks like. But how many of us have any sense at all of the relative position of the ten closest stars to earth? Probably none of us. It’s currently of no practical importance and thus we are under no daily pressure to learn such things. And even the area closer to us is a lot more complicated than was once believed. There may be a dwarf star in the vicinity causing mass extinctions on earth every 25 million years.

If I were young and deciding on a scientific career right now, astronomy might be my choice. There are vast fields of inquiry and numerous stunning discoveries to be made soon.