My ‘Cool Cosmos’ day at the Ontario Science Center started with Ivan Semeniuk‘s talk, titled ‘The Future of Cosmic Exploration‘. He explained how the 2009 is the ‘International Year of Astronomy‘ because 400 years ago, in 1609, Galileo perfected the telescope as a device for studying the heavens, subsequently discovering Jupiters moons and their orbits.

From Semeniuk’s compactified history, I learned that astronomy predates this 400-year mark, with large observatories having existed for centuries before that. These earlier observatories did not use telescopes or other optical aids, but managed to record and tabulate phenomena to piece together the eliptical dances of celestial bodies.

So the telescope is what really opened up the field: suddenly any Tom, Dick and Harry with 2 bits of glass and an interest in the heavens (or, more to the point, an interest in making a name for themselves) could jump onto the bandwagon and start discovering new stars. This is what lead to the rapid growth of astronomy and, with the increasing variety of instruments that we can point at the sky, the birth of its sister-discipline: astrophysics. The latter, I learned, had more to do with understanding (for example) the constituency of matter, with tools such as spectroscopy making it possible to deduce the mixtures of gases or the ratios of certain chemical elements of matter in space. Some more info about future astronomy after the jump… Continue reading →