What are some of the most recent, significant advances in astronomy?

WOW! Where do I start? Well, here's a very crude list of things that have caught my attention over the last few years:

1. Convincing evidence for the existence of super massive black holes in other galaxies
2. Detection of planets outside our solar system and the apparently large numbers of them containing massive planets.
3. Discovery of the persistent isotrophy of gamma ray bursts, and their lack of a convincing origin mechanism
4. Discovery that quasars are indeed found in the cores of certain types of galaxies undergoing violent upheavals in their structure
5. Detection of enormous numbers of proto-planetary disks orbiting young, sun-like stars in the Orion Nebula
6. The persistence of the discrepancy between the age of the universe determined by measuring its expansion rate ( 8 billion years) and estimating the ages of the oldest stars in nearby globular clusters ( 15 billion years).
7. The discovery that much of the gravitational mass in galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and perhaps even the universe is not detectable by simple optical means meaning that perhaps as much as 99 percent of the 'mass' in the universe is 'dark'.
8. The discovery by COBE that the cosmic background radiation is essentially a perfect black body spectrum as predicted by the simplest Big BAng model
9. The COBE discovery that there are faint irregularities in the cosmic background radiation that are too large to have grown to these sizes by gravitional means, meaning that something like an 'Inflationary' phase is required some 10^-34 seconds after the Big Bang: the first confirmation that a simple extension of the Big Bang model with predictions from high-energy physics and Grand Unification Theory may actually be correct!
10. The detection of the Kuiper Cometary Belt in the outer solar system, which confirms over 30 years of speculation about the origin of long-term comets
11. The spectacular agreement between predictions of what Supernova 1987a is doing from theoretical and computer models over 20 years old, and what actually happened
12. The use of the Taylor-Hulse Binary Pulsar to confirm the prediction by general relativity that gravitational waves exist and carry energy