The Future of Astronomy, as suggested by the National Science Foundation

Wednesday, January 11th, 2006 at 04:54 AM by Dave

Michael Turner from the National Science Foundation gave a very interesting presentation on the history of astronomy and where he thinks astronomy will be trending in the future. Below are my notes on what he said.

"We know a lot about the universe. But we also do not know very much. We have big questions that are ripe to answer. We know:

  • What the universe is made of
  • From quark soup to us
  • Evidence for inflation
  • Black holes, all sizes and everywhere
  • Quantum stars (white dwarfs and neutron stars)
  • 140+ planetary systems

The Big Questions are:

  1. What happened before the big bang? Where did the quark soup come from?
  2. What is the dark matter made of? Where are the baryons?
  3. How common are habitable planetary systems, how do they form and are we alone?
  4. When did the first stars form, what is the star formation history, and how do stars end their lives?
  5. How do supermassive black holes form? What happens when they collide? What is in the center of the black hole?
  6. Surprises may come from new windows on the universe – gamma rays neutrinos, ultra high energy cosmic rays and gravity waves.
  7. What is causing the universe to speed up and what is our cosmic destiny?
  8. How and where did the elements of the periodic table form?
  9. How does magnetism power the cosmos, from the sun to black holes and cosmic rays?

These big questions can be matched by powerful space tools: Hubble, Spitzer, Chandra, GLAST, JDEM, JWST, and Con-X On the ground: Kecks, Gemini, and Magellan Advanced instrumentation from adaptive optics and high resolution spectroscopy to multi-object spectrographs, big radio ears from VLA, Arecibo, ALMA, CMB detectors, neutrino, gamma, particle accelerators."

Astronomy is a great stimulus for many people. There are many topics that get people excited and very inquisative. None of these topics can be as stimulating as the questions of, "Where are we going and where did we come from? Is there other life out there?" Hopefully, astronomy will help to answer these questions in the future.

Posted in Astronomy News

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