Das erklärte Universum

"Not another book about the first moments of the universe!" I hear my readers protest. Don't worry, this book is about all the other things that can be found in the universe around us. However, if one wants to tell the story of the universe's development, one cannot avoid asking how all that we observe in the universe came to be. That’s why we look further and further back into the past, as we cannot present what has happened over time in an orderly manner otherwise. This retrospective view of history turns out to be unusually successful, far more successful than the founders of astrophysics and scientific cosmology in the 1930s and 1940s could have imagined. The development of astronomy and cosmology is among the most remarkable advances in modern natural sciences since World War II. We have experienced a Golden Age of Astronomy because completely unexpected new observational methods have provided us with new insights into the events in the sky. Fifty years ago, no one thought that neutron stars would be discovered through observations with long radio waves.