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.