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Asked by maggierider to Alan, Deepak, Francesca, Lilly, Nick on 11 Mar 2014.
Question: What would you say is the most exciting breakthrough in the area you work in?
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Alan Fitzsimmons answered on 11 Mar 2014:
One of them was the discovery of a comet in 1993 that had been broken into 21 pieces. It was called Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. One year later in 1994 all the pieces hit the planet Jupiter. That meant we could study from a safe distance what happen when an asteroid or comet hits a planet. It was spectacular!
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Deepak Kar answered on 11 Mar 2014:
I would have to say the discovery of the Higgs particle at CERN.
Imagine that theorists predicted the existence of this particle about 50 years back, and we finally see sign of it in 2012!
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Francesca Day answered on 11 Mar 2014:
That’s a tricky one! The discovery of the Higgs Boson in July 2012 was very exciting for me. It was a great success for particle physics that the particle theorists predicted would exist was finally discovered. (We had a big party too!)
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Nick Wright answered on 11 Mar 2014:
About ten years ago a group of scientists tried to measure the speed at which the Universe is expanding (due to the Big Bang). When they measured the speed they found that the speed was increasing, meaning that the expansion of the Universe was accelerating! This was such an amazing discovery that we’re still trying to understand now what causes it and what it means. The discovery was so amazing that a couple of years ago the scientists responsible were awarded the Nobel Prize for their work.
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Lilian Hunt answered on 12 Mar 2014:
The biggest one recently has been the announcement that we can now sequence the entire human genome for less then $1000. This is incredibly cheap compared to previous costs and means we can get so much more information about people’s DNA and how it affects us!
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