Image caption Referring to co-habitation, the paper suggests "this phase of the study is ongoing"

An Australian physicist has warmed hearts in the scientific world by casting a marriage proposal in the form of a scientific paper.

The paper, posted to the site Reddit, is titled "Two-body interactions: A Longitudinal Study", in reference to a classic physics problem involving two objects' gravitational forces.

It concludes: "the author proposes to Christie the indefinite continuation of the study".

It appears the proposal was accepted.

Christie and author Brendan are both physicists in Sydney, Australia.

The paper was penned in March 2012, but Christie (surnames have been redacted) first published an image of it on Sunday.

Given the reference to the study's beginnings in the paper's "Overview of Results" section, it appears it was timed to coincide with the couple's seventh anniversary.

The paper includes a graph of "happiness vs. time" - an encouragingly upward trend - and even includes future predictions of happiness.