• Question: How expensive is your research and how quickly do you make discoveries and theories about space?

    Asked by Freya to Stefan, Anna on 12 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Anna Scaife

      Anna Scaife answered on 12 Nov 2014:

      Hey Freya – my research personally is pretty cheap 🙂 But building telescopes isn’t though. The telescope I’m helping build at the moment will cost 1.3 billion Euro… the good thing about it is that most of the money will be spent in local companies who will build the different bits (the scientists don’t get it 🙁 ), which is good for those companies and their staff and good for the economy 🙂

    • Photo: Stefan Lines

      Stefan Lines answered on 12 Nov 2014:

      Hi Freya! My research is about as expensive as the equipment I use. The most expensive device I use would be the supercomputer. I’m not sure how much this cost the university I work at, but it has thousands of computer processors in it, and each ones costs around £1,000! So, quite a lot 😀

      I think it depends what are of astronomy you’re in as to how frequently you make discoveries. I have colleagues in the observing side of Exoplanets, and they’re frequently discovering new planets (monthly). For me, it took about a year to run simulations and confirm a hypothesis about planet formation 🙂

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