Astronomy and space in curricula — Towards a continental education

Abstract

Astronomy, as one of the oldest sciences, has an innate appeal for people of all ages, partly because it concerns the fascinating, great questions “of life, the Universe and everything” and partly because much of the data obtained with telescopes can be presented as objects of stunning beauty. From a historical perspective, astronomy plays a vital role in the development of natural science and European identity. It were the ancient Greeks who developed astronomy to a highly sophisticated level, European astronomers like Copernicus, Kepler and Galilei who proposed the heliocentric systems and proved the old Ptolemaic system to be wrong and Newton and Einstein who showed the world how gravity functions.