• 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.

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!