The long view

摘要

According to some, we are in a golden era for astronomy The voyages of NASA's deep-space probes in the 1970s and 1980s gave us stunning images and undreamed-of information about our neighbours in the solar system. The advent of the space telescope has given us access to sharper images than ever of the planets, the stars of the Milky Way and distant galaxies. Since the 1950s, radio telescopes have told us about the stars we can't see, emitting different frequencies of radiation. With all these advances, our knowledge of the processes that power stars, and that formed the universe itself, continue to grow.