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Asked by erandavitija to Mark, Sarah on 21 Jun 2010 in Categories: Your Research. This question was also asked by aqsa.
Question: what is the most amazing thing you have investigated.
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Mark Roberts answered on 21 Jun 2010:
At the moment I’m working on how parts of the bacterial cell split when the cell divides. I think that is pretty amazing as it’s something that happens without fail every hour or so as the cells divide and yes is quite complex
Really amazing (well to me anyway)
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Sarah Bardsley answered on 21 Jun 2010:
That’s a hard question. Because my job envolves looking at new scientific discoveries, everyday I learn something pretty incredible. At the moment I’m really interested in ocean acidification. This is caused by the seas taking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, turning them more acidic. The impacts on marine life could be quite severe. For example, shell making species (like muscles, scollaps and coral) may find it harder to make their shells. Therefore these structures become thinner, making the organisms more susceptible to predators and less likely to survive. As a consequence the entire food chain could be threaten, and industries reliant on healthy seas. ONe way to stop this would be to reduce carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere by switching to cleaner fuels.
Comments
Paul commented on :
I guess it would be star systems where we see black holes “cannibalising” their neighbouring stars – so a black hole (that was made when one of a pair of stars died in Supernova explosion, leaving behind a “dead star” that is so dense that not even light can escape it) is orbiting around a “normal star”, but because the gravitational field of the black hole is so strong, it is tearing it’s companion apart.
The black hole is basically pulling the other star apart, dragging the surface of the other star off and “eating” it (the gas from the other star falls into the black hole, making it heavier, but often it gets so hot as it is dragged across that it reaches temeperature sof millions of degrees, and emits X-rays).
Some of my research is investigating systems like this and trying to work out what is happening, and in particular trying to figure out what we can measure – we’re really interested in knowing the mass of the black hole, as these sorts of things tell us a lot about the very wierd physics that goes on when you deal with very extreme things, like dying or “dead” stars”.