• Question: Whats the best experiment you have ever done?

    Asked by moley123 to Sam, Kate on 14 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by zombiewolf.
    • Photo: Sam Geen

      Sam Geen answered on 14 Jun 2013:

      During my PhD we ran a simulation to make a galaxy like the Milky Way – see my profile page for a picture of it! It took millions of hours in total on hundreds of computer processors, and the outputs from it take up terabytes of data. My job was to understand what happens to all the little galaxies that the Milky Way is capturing with its gravity and tearing apart – it turns out that as the little galaxies fall through the Milky Way they get torn apart by tidal forces (tidal forces are where two ends of a galaxy feel different amounts of gravitational force, so they get pulled apart into long streams).

      So that’s the most impressive experiment I’ve worked on. But I’ve only really started my career as a scientist, so who knows what experiments I’ll work on. Currently I’m blowing up stars, which is also pretty neat.

    • Photo: Kate Husband

      Kate Husband answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      Not sure if this is really an experiment but making liquid nitrogen ice cream is pretty good fun! You cool the ingredients with liquid nitrogen at -196C and they freeze into ice cream, but because you cool it so quickly it only has time to form little crystals of ice cream and so its the smoothest and creamiest ice cream ever!

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