In March, a team of astronomers made a shocking announcement: They appeared to have found a galaxy with a severe lack of dark matter. The finding, published in Nature, challenged some of astronomers’ most fundamental knowledge about galaxy formation.
Perhaps as surprising as the result was the technology behind it. While many major astronomical discoveries are made by collaborations of hundreds or thousands of people with access to large, multimillion-dollar telescopes, the bizarre galaxy was observed by a team of five using a telescope two scientists constructed in their spare time from off-the-shelf Canon camera lenses.
The scope, called Dragonfly, is just one example of the small-scale projects that are making waves in fields such as astronomy and particle physics.
“Government agencies are uniquely positioned to be able to conduct the important big experiments,” says Fermilab scientist Aaron Chou. “But it shouldn’t be a requirement that the experiment has to be big to be interesting. The requirement should be, and is, that if the science is interesting, you should just go ahead and do it.”
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