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8. AN OLD VISION OF A NEW CLUSTER: SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

At the end of this long yet not exhaustive historical review, one is left with the feeling that everything was already known since long ago. It is sufficient to have a quick look to the important steps in our scientific understanding of the Coma cluster, before 1980:

At the time they were produced, many of these early results needed firm confirmation, that eventually came from more (and more accurate) data; on the other hand, our theoretical understanding of these observational evidences is still far from complete. However, it seems to me that the picture of a dynamically young Coma cluster was already contained in these early results. So, maybe a more appropriate choice for this conference title could have been: "An Old Vision of a New Cluster".


Acknowledments

This paper is dedicated to my wife Patrizia, for sharing my busy life of wandering astronomer.

No historical review is unbiased. I apologize for the excessive emphasis I may have put on my personal results, and for all other people's results that I have misquoted or forgotten to mention.

I wish to thank Fabienne Casoli, Florence Durret, Daniel Gerbal, Alain Mazure, for the perfect organization of this conference. I thank Michael West for pointing out to me Herschel's work on the Coma cluster. I acknowledge the hospitality of the Trieste Astronomical Observatory, where a significant part of my bibliographic research was done.

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