The key to astronomy has often been serendipity

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The history of science is filled with lucky breaks, cases where researchers have stumbled across something unexpected that ended up leading to a major breakthrough—it was a scientist, after all, who said "chance favors the prepared mind." But a perspective published today in Science brings the year of astronomy to a nice end by discussing just how often luck has played a role in the progress of that field.

One of the stories, of course, is Galileo—it's the anniversary of his first use of a telescope. But it's easy to forget that the first instrument wasn't actually intended to be a telescope at all; instead, it was a spyglass that was expected to find use as an instrument of war. Nor was Galileo especially intent on completely upsetting Europe's view of its place in the Universe when he pointed the spyglass at the skies. That just happened to be a side effect of seeing comets and the moons of other worlds for the first time.

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