WHAT A DECADE!
“THERE ARE MORE THINGS IN HEAVEN and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Hamlet was speaking of ghosts and murder, but he might well have been summarizing the past decade of scientific discovery, described by one prominent astronomer in these pages as “spectacular in terms of achievements.” In that time Pluto was demoted from its status as a planet but, weighed against the loss, researchers peering into the universe with powerful new telescopes and space probes have discovered 500 planets beyond our solar system; gathered extraordinary images from the recently tuned-up Hubble Space Telescope; scanned radio signals in search of extraterrestrial life; drilled into the rock of Mars; discovered new rings of Saturn; tracked the trajectory of potentially catastrophic asteroids hurtling toward Earth; and looked toward the dense…