David Kipping

And then we discovered Ceres, and there was a bunch of asteroid objects, Janus.

And so for a while, the textbooks had something like 13 planets in the solar system.

And then that was just a new capability that was emerging to detect those small objects.

And then we ripped that up and said, no, no, we're going to change the definition of a planet.

And then the same thing happened when we started looking at the outer skirts of the Solar System again.

We found Eris, we found Sedna, these objects which resembled Pluto, and the more and more of them we found make make.

And eventually, we again had to rethink

the way we even contextualize what a planet is and what the nature of the outer Solar System is.

So regardless as to what you think about the debate about whether Pluto should be devoted or not, which I know often evokes a lot of strong feelings, it is an incredible achievement that we were able to

transform our view of the Solar System in a matter of years just by basically charge-coupled devices, the things that's in cameras.

Though the invention of that device allowed us to detect objects which were much further away, much fainter, and revealed all of this stuff that was there all along.

And so that's the beauty of astronomy.

There's just so much to discover, and even in our own backyard.

Yeah, I think usually astronomy moves forward dramatically and science in general when you have a new technological capability come online for the first time.

And we kind of just gave examples of that there with the solar system.

So what kind of new capabilities might emerge in the next 100 years?

The capability I would love to see is not just, I mean, in the next 10, 20 years, we're hoping to take these pale blue dot images we spoke about.

So that requires building something like JWST, but on an even larger scale and optimized for direct imaging.

You'd have to have either coronagraph or a star shade or something to block out the starlight and reveal those pale blue dots.

So in the next sort of decades, I think that's the achievement that we can look forward to in our lifetimes is to see photos of other Earths.