It's been a long year, this Year of Astronomy 2009 ... I had never written for the public and be able to keep a regular space for a whole year was a great challenge that seemed almost impossible to sustain ... when the first of us began to think seriously about this idea, when we offered to children of Money, we did not know that would take shape ... but then, thanks to the participation of many friends and colleagues, we managed to keep his word!
And so "to see the stars," he said, week after week, many pieces of our universe, from the small items close to home - our Earth the comets, the planets and satellites neighbors - through the stars, the birth to death, then get the biggest and most distant cosmic agglomerations - the galaxies, clusters of galaxies the , the structure of 'Universe on a grand scale and its expansion - trying to figure out why all these bodies are distributed in this way .
We have presented the most advanced telescopes that scan the sky in different bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays, through a telescope that looks like a great binoculars and a observatory aboard a plane , not to mention the 'adaptive optics , a powerful technique used to reduce the harmful effects of atmospheric turbulence on astronomical images.
We have also reported the latest news regarding probes and satellites that scan the universe outside the Earth: launch the Planck satellite, which observes the cosmic microwave radiation the repair the Hubble Space Telescope, the last flyby of the planet Rosetta, which will study a comet's very, very closely.
We also tried to explain the current state of our knowledge about the composition of the universe, starting from ' origin of the elements on Earth to dark matter and dark energy that permeates the Universe but the nature of which little is known, through the elusive neutrinos and particles studied in accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider .
We have also listed the techniques to detect other planets outside the solar system giving an overview of the space telescopes dedicated to this research and examine the possibility that life exists elsewhere in the Universe .
We celebrated two significant anniversaries - the 40th anniversary of what has gone down in history as the first "landing" and 90 years from ' experiment confirmed the theory of Einstein's General Relativity - and we have proposed a rediscovery of the sky with the naked eye - comets, eclipses , "shooting stars" - in memory of another significant anniversary, the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first observations from (and heated disputes that resulting ).
We have always kept an eye on the physics behind the beautiful images of the cosmos, trying to explain the meaning of words like blacks holes, quasars , gravitational lenses, flashes of gamma rays , chaos theory ...
We learned a lot this year, and we hope to also be able (at least a little) in order to tell what is really research in astronomy. We hope that our readers have learned something and that you have enjoyed following it.
What will become of this blog next year, still do not know ... To find out, stay tuned ... Happy 2010 to all readers "to see the stars"!
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