Here's a big discovery that was made using some very simple tools:

The Milky Way is twice the size we thought it was

We were tossing around ideas about the size of the Galaxy, and thought we had better check the standard numbers that everyone uses," Professor Gaensler said. Image credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

It took just a couple of hours using data available on the internet for University of Sydney scientists to discover that the Milky Way is twice as wide as previously thought.

Astrophysicist Professor Bryan Gaensler led a team that has found that our galaxy - a flattened spiral about 100,000 light years across - is 12,000 light years thick, not the 6,000 light years that had been previously thought.

Proving not all science requires big, expensive apparatus, Professor Gaensler and colleagues, Dr Greg Madsen, Dr Shami Chatterjee and PhD student Ann Mao, downloaded data from the internet and analysed it in a spreadsheet.

The team came to this new conclusion by measuring how much the output of pulsars slows as it is traveling through the galaxy's warm ionized medium -- the sea of electrons which lies between the stars and various other galactic objects. The team came to its more accurate picture of the galaxy's width by rejecting a number of data points, concluding that the pulsars that le above or below the galactic plane provide more precise measurements than those in the middle.

How interesting that there are such significant discoveries to be made just by looking at existing data in a spreadsheet. I wonder what startling facts are lying in piles of collected numbers and waiting to be discovered?