• Question: What was the last thing you dicovered?

    Asked by dorito to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 15 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by davidsj, ckara, igloo23.
    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      The last thing I discovered were some tiny fossils over two billion years old, that nobody had ever seen before. It’s pretty cool when you look down a microscope at fossils, and think that creature hasn’t been seen by humans ever before!

    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      I found a bogey just after I finished my lunch.

    • Photo: Nazim Bharmal

      Nazim Bharmal answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      The absolutely last thing I discovered was that a laser we were using at the telescope (a little one) wasn’t working as we thought: instead of producing a constant beam of light, it was turning on and off almost 100,000 times per second. That did matter a little bit, and it did make me think of a good undergraduate student project to do next year.

      That is often how science progresses: you accidentally discover something, and then that leads onto something else.

      As for Adam’s bogey, well after I discovered the laser thing above, I had a nose-bleed because it was so dry and I discovered it is hard to get blood out of the William Herschel Telescope control panel 8-|

    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 18 Mar 2012:

      My most recent paper I have worked on shows that bars (lines of stars across the centre of galaxies) are more common in galaxies which have a lot of neighbours. That is interesting because some people think that the bars might be triggered by galaxies getting near other galaxies – so it seems to prove it.

      BUT…. we already know that galaxies with lots of neighbours tend to be redder (have more old stars) and we had shown previously that bars are more common in red spiral galaxies, so we weren’t sure if it was being red, or having neightbours which was causing the bar.

      well… we showed that about half of the trend for galaxies with neighbours to have bars was because they were redder, but that a red galaxy with neightbours was more likely to have a bar than one without neighbours – so it’s a bit of both.

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