• Question: ive been looking at ur profil did you enjoy the ufo thing? what was it about?

    Asked by kaylee222 to Alan, Deepak, Francesca, Lilly, Nick on 10 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Deepak Kar

      Deepak Kar answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      I have not seen an UFO yet (but wont it be wonderful if I did!).

    • Photo: Alan Fitzsimmons

      Alan Fitzsimmons answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      Sorry, UFOs don’t exist. Astronomers are PAID to watch the sky, and we never see anything like flying saucers.

      Of course, if we did ever find alien life then we’d report it immediately, because it would be one of the most important discoveries ever made.

      We’d also become famous and rich, which would be nice.

    • Photo: Francesca Day

      Francesca Day answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      Well noticed! I wasn’t studying real UFOs of course (they don’t exist!). In my research, UFO stands for “Unidentified Falling Object”. (Yes, particle physicists like bad jokes!) I was working at the Large Hadron Collider, which is a big machine built to collide particles together really fast. When I was there, they were having problems with very small bits of dust falling into the particle beams. We called these bits of dust UFOs!

      I was helping to figure out exactly what the “UFOs” were. It was lots of fun, particularly working with so many other particle physicists. 🙂

    • Photo: Nick Wright

      Nick Wright answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      I’d love to see a UFO one day! As a scientist I would then try to work out what it was, so then it wouldn’t be an unidentified flying object, but an identified flying object or IFO. That doesn’t sound as cool though.

    • Photo: Lilian Hunt

      Lilian Hunt answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      I’m learning from this question as much as you are! I might keep an eye to the sky in case I found one so I could become super rich and famous now…!

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