5 Reasons Why The 21st Century Will Be The Best One Ever For Astrophysics [Starts With A Bang]

“When we have found how the nucleus of atoms is built up we shall have found the greatest secret of all — except life.” -Ernest Rutherford

What does the future of astrophysics look like? Have we already made all of the fundamental discoveries we’re going to make? Is the rest just categorization of objects, identification of more examples of what’s already known, and minor refinements of the knowledge we already have? Or are there fundamental discoveries still to come, just waiting for us to reveal them?

The four possible fates of our Universe into the future; the last one appears to be the Universe we live in, dominated by dark energy. Image credit: E. Siegel.

There are so many big questions still out there, and a great many of them have astrophysical consequences! In addition to new observatories, larger telescopes than ever, and problems like dark matter and the matter/antimatter asymmetry, there are five recent discoveries – within the last generation – that have significant implications for the Universe.

Merging black holes are one class of objects that creates gravitational waves of certain frequencies and amplitudes. Thanks to detectors like LIGO, we can ‘hear’ these sounds as they occur. Image credit: LIGO, NSF, A. Simonnet (SSU).

Come take a look at five of them: neutrino mass, the accelerating universe, exoplanets, the Higgs boson, and gravitational waves, and learn what the future holds!

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2q320vV

“When we have found how the nucleus of atoms is built up we shall have found the greatest secret of all — except life.” -Ernest Rutherford

What does the future of astrophysics look like? Have we already made all of the fundamental discoveries we’re going to make? Is the rest just categorization of objects, identification of more examples of what’s already known, and minor refinements of the knowledge we already have? Or are there fundamental discoveries still to come, just waiting for us to reveal them?

The four possible fates of our Universe into the future; the last one appears to be the Universe we live in, dominated by dark energy. Image credit: E. Siegel.

There are so many big questions still out there, and a great many of them have astrophysical consequences! In addition to new observatories, larger telescopes than ever, and problems like dark matter and the matter/antimatter asymmetry, there are five recent discoveries – within the last generation – that have significant implications for the Universe.

Merging black holes are one class of objects that creates gravitational waves of certain frequencies and amplitudes. Thanks to detectors like LIGO, we can ‘hear’ these sounds as they occur. Image credit: LIGO, NSF, A. Simonnet (SSU).

Come take a look at five of them: neutrino mass, the accelerating universe, exoplanets, the Higgs boson, and gravitational waves, and learn what the future holds!

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2q320vV