• Question: What is your most interesting discovery?

    Asked by anon-219693 to Nicolas, Laurence, Emma, Declan, Bella, Ali on 14 Jun 2019.
    • Photo: Laurence Datrier

      Laurence Datrier answered on 14 Jun 2019:


      I didn’t come up with the idea, but during my masters I worked on how to use gravitational waves from black holes merging to measure how fast the universe is expanding. It was really interesting!

    • Photo: Bella Boulderstone

      Bella Boulderstone answered on 18 Jun 2019:


      I have spent almost all of my PhD finding out how far away the hottest dust is from the accretion disc which surrounds supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies.
      Finding out how big something is in space with any degree of accuracy is tough because space has the ‘close and small/big and far away’ problem all the time! So being able to say that there is a distance that I know in space, that’s really important.

    • Photo: Declan Jonckers

      Declan Jonckers answered on 19 Jun 2019:


      At work, the most interesting discovery I’ve made is that a method lots of organisations use to make their blankets doesn’t work as well as everyone thinks it does! So I’ve come up with a better way of doing it 🙂

    • Photo: Nicolas Bonne

      Nicolas Bonne answered on 21 Jun 2019:


      During my PhD I studied the properties of lots and lots of galaxies near to us in the Universe. I particularly liked one type, which were spiral galaxies (which are usually blue, and making lots of new stars) but were red and had stopped making most of their stars. Nobody quite knows exactly how this happens just yet, but I was able to show that they were just as heavy as normal spiral galaxies. This told us that they had probably only just stopped making new stars very recently. Maybe not that exciting, but I thought it was at the time 🙂

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