> Most things that are learned about are observed to exist before being studied. Is this true at this point for physics and astronomy? I have no idea what the

> Most things that are learned about are observed to exist before being studied. Is this true at this point for physics and astronomy? I have no idea what the relative proportion of discoveries are "this was predicted to exist and we found it!" vs "whoa this is totally unexpected." I suspect that there's also a ton of things in the middle, where an anomalous reading that doesn't directly show the existence of something but does show the deficiency of a theory then leads to corrections in the theory which then result in another cascade of predictions of existence from the theory.