Lights and Shadows on Galaxies Understanding
Date Issued
2016
Author(s)
Abstract
With this book we neither aimed at tracing a history, even concise, of extragalactic
astronomy nor at summarizing the vast panorama of scientific successes in this
field of astrophysics. Our wish was to stimulate some distinguished researchers, via
interviews in specific fields of extragalactic studies, at expressing their own convictions
and perplexities about the progresses achieved in our understanding of galaxies
across one century of research, if necessary emphasizing the scientific problems that
still remain open. After about fifty interviews, we try in this chapter to delineate a
picture underlying the facts and the views emerged from the presentations.
The US of the second decade of XXth century has been the cradle where a bunch
of scientists triggered a debate about the nature of spiral nebulæ, and put into discussion
the size of The Galaxy set by Jacobus Kapteyn. The new research field,
extragalactic astronomy, very soon reached the rank of a mature scientific branch
of astrophysics “on the shoulder of giants” of the caliber of Hubble, Zwicky and
Baade. However, it was only after WWII that the growth of extragalactic astronomy
was overwhelming thanks to big investments in US and later on, for the worse economic
conditions, also in some European countries and in Japan. In the last decade
of the XXth century extragalactic astronomy assumed the today physiognomy of
highly developed science branch in most of the advanced and emerging economies.
The national level institutions and observing facilities characterizing the 1960-1980s
decades boosted huge international collaborations and consortia, with hundreds of
researchers involved with ground based telescopes located in the best observing
sites. Space facilities with a complete wavelength coverage bypassed the limitations imposed by the Earth atmosphere providing a panchromatic view of galaxies. We
refer to this as the Big Science era of extragalactic astronomy.
Coverage
From the Realm of the Nebulae to Populations of Galaxies
Volume
435
Start page
739
Ads BibCode
2016ASSL..435..739D
Rights
restricted
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
FromTheRealmOfThe Nebuale-2016_Chapter10.pdf
Description
[Administrators only]
Size
608.79 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
5dd56bb0d652621f207aefa8eed9168d