What’s the most unexpected thing you have discovered?

Question: What's the most unexpected thing you have discovered?

Asked by anon-202058 to Sophia, Sarah, Meirin, George, Emily, Andy on 5 Mar 2019. This question was also asked by anon-201743.
- Sarah O'Sullivan answered on 5 Mar 2019:
  
  I’ve made orange uranium compounds but under conditions that would normally mean they were black. That was a surprise!
- George Fulton answered on 5 Mar 2019:
  
  I haven’t discovered a whole lot. But I am recently discovered the opposite result to a published paper! This was certainly unexpected. However, by modifying the parameters of the experiment, I was able to get the same results. But I haven’t been able to answer the question as to why this happened…. yet! 🙂
- Andy Buckley answered on 5 Mar 2019:
  
  I recently discovered that some particles called b-hadrons, which are key to a lot of LHC measurements and which typically fly a few millimetres before decaying (that’s long-lived in our terms) can actually fly further than 50 cm, deep into our detector, in the most extreme collisions that we can now study. Our simulation doesn’t currently handle that properly, because in reality they’d hit material on the way, so we have some work to do to sort that out!
- Meirin Oan Evans answered on 7 Mar 2019:
  
  So far everything I’ve worked on has agreed with the prediction made by the physics theory we’re testing. What would be really interesting is if the experiment didn’t agree! This could be a sign that we haven’t understood something. Believe it or not, most scientists would be excited if they didn’t understand something, because then they need to go away and understand it!
- Emily Lewis answered on 11 Mar 2019:
  
  Nothing huge yet!
  I’ve been thinking about how fast we can drain this theoretical reactor design in an emergency- we have some results and are looking to publish. But it was about what I had expected so no crazy surprises.
  As Meirin says, it’s normally more exciting when things are unexpected and go wrong! Then we have to go back and change our theory and underlying assumptions.
- Sophia Pells answered on 11 Mar 2019:
  
  No major discoveries yet. I’ve found that it is possible to produce some of the radioactive isotopes I’m studying in the UK rather than just at CERN in Switzerland. I’m still looking at how we can make the production better though.

Question: What's the most unexpected thing you have discovered?

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