Call for Nominations: Astronomy Results of the Year

It’s more or less traditional for magazines and tv shows to do some sort of year-end wrap-up. As this blog is now hosted by a magazine, I suppose I ought to follow suit. Of course, compiling “Year’s Best” lists is a highly subjective business, requiring a lot of information gathering, so I’ll throw this open to my readers before compiling my own highly biased list.

So, a call for nominations:

In your opinion, what is the most important, influential, or exciting development in astronomy in 2006?

This could be a new observation, a new type of observation technique, or it could be an exciting new theoretical development. There will be a separate post for nominating the physics result of the year, so try to restrict this to astronomy. Post your nomination (or nominations– I’m not going to limit the number of submissions) in the comments, ideally with some sort of citation (refereed journal articles would be best, though I’ll take ArXiV links or popular-press stories), and some short statement of why this is an important result.

I’ll compile a list of nominations, and if we get enough good ones, I’ll have a vote, like for the Top Eleven. If we don’t get enough good nominations, I’ll just post my own biased list.