Astronomy continues to unravel the mysteries of the universe, reveal astonishing phenomena, reshape our understanding of the universe, and raise new questions for scientists to investigate.

Wendy Freedman, John & Marion Sullivan University Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, The University of Chicago

I would like to see the discovery of dark matter. And to see if the currently observed “cracks” in our standard model of cosmology persist over time.

George Efstathiou, Leverhulme Trust Emeritus Fellow, Emeritus Professor of Astrophysics, Kavli Institute for Cosmology, University of Cambridge

I would like to see evidence of supersymmetry from the Large Hadron Collider.

Avi Loeb, Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science, Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation, Harvard University

In 2025, the Rubin Observatory in Chile will begin operations and survey the southern sky with a 3.2 gigapixel camera every four days.

I hope it would discover more anomalous interstellar objects like 2017’s “Oumuamua” so that we can get enough data about them to infer whether there is technological space debris from extraterrestrial civilizations among the icy rocks.

I spoke of this hope in my recent book”Interstellar“, whose paperback edition was published in August 2024.

Martin Rees, Fellow of Trinity College and Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics, University of Cambridge; Astronomer Royal

We should remember that advances in astronomy do not depend on armchair theory, but on increasingly sophisticated instruments—especially telescopes observing from space at all bandwidths.

In this context, we should certainly appreciate the successful recent tests of the massive SpaceX Starship rocket. It can carry heavy payloads into space at a much lower cost than before because even the huge first stage can be recovered and reused.

If the Starship had been available at the time the James Webb telescope was designed, the cost could have been reduced by a factor of three.

This is because the less stringent weight limits would allow for a more robust construction without the need for exotic materials – and more importantly, the 6.5m mirror could be launched in one piece without the complex and risky procedure actually involved. its assembly robotically from a mosaic of 18 separate pieces of glass.

I would also point out that we can expect substantial advances in computer performance and artificial intelligence. Astronomy is a subject where we can’t do real experiments – we can’t knock real galaxies together or set off stellar explosions.

But we can do it in a virtual universe on a computer. Many of the advances in our understanding over the past 20 years have come from increasingly complex simulations: when these simulations were run for sets of models making different assumptions (for example, with and without dark matter), it was possible to see which fit the actual observations better.

By doing so, we have already learned about why galaxies have their observed morphology; that there is five times more matter in the mysterious dark matter than in “ordinary” atoms. We are also learning how the supermassive black holes at their centers manifest. Still higher resolution should be possible with more powerful computers.

We also need computers and artificial intelligence to analyze large datasets. Astronomy is no longer data-poor: Europe’s Gaia satellite has measured the colors and motions of nearly two billion stars in our galaxy; optical telescopes scanning the sky detect millions of galaxies.

Finding subtle correlations from this database is clearly a task for AI. (And of course, in our own solar system, robotic probes will be able to do better science without the help of astronauts as AI becomes more advanced).

Finally, being a theorist myself, I await the time when we understand the exotic physics of the ultra-early universe, when gravity affects the microcosm and space has other dimensions.

It could be that computers, thanks to their speed, will be able to solve mathematical problems that are too daunting for any human – to test these theories.