The year 2015 saw enormous progress in understanding our high-energy Universe, and also brought some new questions and mysteries to the fore. During the past year we bade a fond farewell to the Vermillion Bird, the
Suzaku X-ray Observatory, which ended its mission of exploring the X-ray sky after a decade of sucessful observations. We welcomed India's first X-ray satellite observatory,
ASTROSAT, launched on September 28, and we also started to open a totally new window on the Universe with the launch on December 2 of
LISA Pathfinder, a space platform testing technologies which one day may allow us to view the
ripples of spacetime predicted by Einstein. We saw evidence of black holes shredding stars and other bits of material that incautiously wandered too close to their voracious gravitational wells. We saw new exciting observations from
NuSTAR, bringing the high energy Universe in focus. We modelled WIMPS near rotating black holes, black holes colliding with other black holes, and delicious gamma-ray novae. With the upcoming launches of
Astro-H and the
Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (or NICER as it's commonly known), 2016 promises to be another extraordinary high-energy year too.
HEAPOW: That Was the Year that Was, Wasn't It? (2016 Jan 04)