By placing astronomical instruments in space, they would be free from the interference of Earth’s atmosphere. Observing instruments in space have played important roles since the age of artificial satellites began with Sputnik in 1957. Astronomical instruments had earlier been sent aloft on balloons and rockets, but satellites permitted vastly longer observing times and greater stability. The very first U.S. satellite, Explorer 1, launched in 1958 as a project designed for the International Geophysical Year, was involved in a major discovery. The radiation detector on board gave the first signs of the belts of energetic charged particles that surround Earth (the Van Allen belts, named for American physicist James Van Allen). Beginning in 1962, a series of eight Orbital Solar Observatories monitored the Sun for more than a complete sunspot cycle and had far clearer views of the Sun’s corona than could be obtained from Earth-based observatories, because of the distortion of optical images by Earth’s atmosphere.

The first successful planetary flyby was that of Venus in 1962 by Mariner 2, which carried several instruments but no cameras. The first flyby to return images was the Mariner 4 mission in 1965, which sent back 22 images of Mars. The first flybys of Jupiter and Saturn—Pioneer 10 (1973) and Pioneer 11 (1979)—sent back spectacular images of the planets and their rings and satellites that fundamentally altered planetary science and captured the public imagination. Specialized satellites have extended astronomical observing into the infrared, gamma-ray, and X-ray portions of the spectrum.

In 1989 the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite began precise measurements of the microwave background radiation. This gave, by 1994, a perfect fit to a blackbody spectrum corresponding to 2.726K (−270.424 °C [−454.763 °F]). However, the most significant result, announced by American physicist George Smoot in 1992, was COBE’s detection of small fluctuations in the temperature in different directions in space—variations as small as a few parts in 100,000—that correspond to density fluctuations in the early universe at the decoupling time, about 300,000 years after the big bang. This discovery came as a relief to cosmologists, because the earlier failure to detect fluctuations in the spectrum was starting to cause difficulties for theories of structure formation in the early universe.

By far the most ambitious instrument put into Earth orbit was the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), launched in 1990. Shortly afterward it was discovered that a design flaw in the principal mirror greatly reduced the image quality, but this was fixed by compensating optical devices inserted on a subsequent service trip by astronauts to the telescope. Among the original missions of the HST were determining more accurate values of the Hubble constant and the deceleration parameter, with the goal of limiting the number of possible cosmological models. The deceleration parameter is a measure of the rate at which the expansion of the universe is slowing down as the universe expands against gravity.

Dark energy

In the 1980s astronomers began to use Type Ia supernovae as standard candles. These are believed to come about in the following way. A white dwarf star in a binary orbit with a neighbour can slowly pull material off, gradually increasing its own mass. Ordinarily the mass of the white dwarf could not exceed the Chandrasekhar limit of about 1.4 solar masses, or it would collapse to form a neutron star. However, in the case of white dwarfs rich in carbon, with the slow accretion of material pulled from the neighbour, the core temperature rises until the nuclear ignition of carbon causes a runaway explosion. Because of the slow accretion and the mass limit, these supernovae are remarkably uniform in their brightness; moreover, because they are so bright, they can be seen at great distances. In short, the uniform and extreme brightness of Type Ia supernovae make them excellent standard candles.

In the 1990s two groups used observations of Type Ia supernovae in distant galaxies to work out distances to those galaxies, and thus how the rate of the universe’s expansion changed over time, more precisely than ever before. The Supernova Cosmology Project, led by American physicist Saul Perlmutter, and the High-Z Supernova Search Team, directed by Australian astronomer Brian Schmidt and American astronomer Adam Riess, used observations taken with ground-based telescopes as well as with the HST. The result was most unexpected. Far from finding a better value for the deceleration parameter, after a period of confusion and contradiction, both groups found that the expansion of the universe is actually speeding up. The direct observations were that distant supernovae appeared to be 20–25 percent dimmer than expected. The two teams ruled out such possibilities as dimming by dust, and their papers, published in 1998 and 1999, led to the same general conclusion. The expansion of the universe is accelerating, and that acceleration began only about five billion or six billion years ago.

The consensus emerging from the Ia supernovae projects was that the geometry of the universe is essentially flat, and therefore quite close to the critical density, with matter making up only about 30 percent of the total energy density and “dark energy” making up the remaining 70 percent. (Subsequent research has slightly modified these figures.) Although other possibilities are open, the dark energy is often identified with an Einsteinian cosmological constant that provides a universal repulsive force, which explains the acceleration. The nature of the dark energy is unknown. It may be connected with quantum-mechanical vacuum energy; however, there are serious unresolved difficulties with this possibility. Of the roughly 30 percent of the universe that is matter, only about 5 percent can be ordinary baryonic matter. Of this, only a small part is visible in the form of planets, stars, and galaxies.

The objects of all astronomical inquiry, from the time of the ancient Greeks and Babylonians to the 20th century, thus represent only the tip of the iceberg. After almost 4,000 years of astronomy, the universe is no less strange than it must have seemed to the Babylonians.