When I saw ANU running the headline “Researcher on cloud nine over universe discovery” I was pretty excited.
Had the quantum researchers discovered a universe? Or the astronomers?
Either way it would have trumped the Higgs Boson malarky coming out of Switzerland quite handily.
Sadly it turns out they’ve been looking at dwarf galaxies which, like a country town, move more slowly and offer some historical insight.
But they have found some interesting stuff.
But when he started to analyse his measurements, Mr Nicholls discovered that the data didn’t fit the conventional theories. He set out to solve the mystery, and made an unexpected discovery.
“I found that the energies of the electrons in the gas clouds were not distributed the way people had always thought they should be,” he said.
“I used similar measurements of electron energies made by space probes in our Solar System as the basis for a new theory about how gases behave in distant galaxies.
“To my surprise, it explained my data and also solved other problems that had remained unexplained for over 40 years.”
More detail is available from the Astrophysical Journal for those inclined to pay.
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