• Question: What has been your most surprising discovery.

    Asked by Zuriel on 27 Sep 2025.
    • Photo: Emily Walls

      Emily Walls answered on 27 Sep 2025:

      My most surprising discovery was from a recent project where I looked at what happened to stars in galaxies when they collide together. Galaxies can either share their resources to form new stars or completely strip eachother of them so they essentially are left to die (a bit morbid!) Producing new stars is key activity in a galaxy for it survive. From my research I found that there was an increase in passive regions in the galaxies so there was a lot of spaces where no new stars were being formed. Which I found surprising because I would have thought there would have been more regions of active star formation! But every galaxy and interaction is different so it is hard to predict what will happen for every single one.

    • Photo: Martin McCoustra

      Martin McCoustra answered on 29 Sep 2025:

      Perhaps that the way small carbon monoxide molecules arrange themselves on the surfaces of icy grain in the cold, dense regions where stars are forming actually helps trigger the formation of stars.

    • Photo: Luke Fountain

      Luke Fountain answered on 4 Nov 2025:

      Mine is much more boring and mundane than Emily and Martin’s examples! But I’ve found that plant nitrogen uptake can alter the pH of a hydroponic nutrient solution, and we can make the pH go either up or down depending on which form of nitrogen we give to the plants. Since we give the plants nitrogen anyway in our fertiliser, this means that we can control the pH of the nutrient solution (which is really important for healthy plants) just by using the fertiliser. This is really important for human space exploration, because when we grow plants in space, we have to take everything with us. At the moment, we take special chemicals up as well as fertiliser just to control pH. If we can use the fertiliser and the plant to do it for us, that means we have to take less up to space with us, which makes it cheaper and more sustainable. It also happens that the form of nitrogen we need to do this, ammonium, is found in human waste streams like urine, so it means we might even be able to recycle nitrogen from urine to both grow plants and control pH in the future – this is a big step forward in sustainability.

Comments

  • Photo: Gabrielle (she/her)

    Gabrielle (she/her) commented on :

    There is a virus that causes cancer in chickens (Marek’s disease), and very old versions of this virus didn’t actually cause tumours, just a mild and temporary paralysis. Currently the virus is extremely bad and fatal news for chickens in the poultry industry, but in some islands in Indonesia a really old and mild version of the virus still exists!