Astrophysicist Feryal Ӧzel takes the stage at 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater to discuss the groundbreaking work behind the first-ever photograph of the black hole at the center of Messier 87, a galaxy 55 million light-years from Earth, and the first photo of the black hole — called Sagittarius A — at the center of our Milky Way.
Ӧzel, who is speaking as part of the Chautauqua Lecture Series Week Seven theme of “Wonder and Awe,” is professor and chair in the School of Physics at Georgia Institute of Technology where her work on astrophysics focuses on theoretical and computational studies of the properties, formation and environments of black holes and neutron stars. Ӧzel developed new techniques to determine the properties of neutron star surfaces and interiors, and was a founding member of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.
Ӧzel fell in love with black holes when writing her dissertation at Harvard University. Wondering if she could actually glimpse a black hole directly, she decided to take on the challenge.
The first black hole photo was of the one at the center of M87; after imaging Sagittarius A, scientists involved in the endeavor were able to look for similarities and differences, Ӧzel told the Arizona Daily Star. Black holes don’t sit completely still, she said, and Sagittarius A is moving more rapidly than M87. Researchers had to develop new techniques to capture the image.
“The two images appear very similar to us when we gaze at them in the sky,” Özel said during a 2022 news conference held by the National Science Foundation to unveil the new image of Sagittarius A. “But the two black holes couldn’t have been more different from each other in practically every other way.”
A physicist by training, Ӧzel’s path ended up taking her in a more astronomy-heavy direction — but in an interview with the American Institute of Physics for the Niels Bohr Library & Archives Oral History Project, she said feels equally at home in both areas. She characterizes “astronomy” as the more traditional, observational methods that astronomers have used to understand and categorize the universe around us; while physics defines the effort to develop physical models for the things observed.
Growing up in Turkey, Ӧzel’s home environment was one of dinner-table conversations about science and, since both parents were medical doctors, the surgeries of the day — this background, in part, led to her interest in physics. One of her earliest political memories was of the 1980 Turkish coup, and she found it encouraged her to be more outspoken about what she wants in a society.
Going to college in the United States, Ӧzel decided to double major in electrical engineering and psychics (with electrical engineering as the fallback, since basic science was frowned upon in a family of medical doctors), but was honest about having zero interest in electrical engineering. Before that, she attended an international American middle school and high school, where there was no “expectation that boys do one thing; girls do one thing,” Ӧzel told the American Institute of Physics. There tends to be a message to girls, Ӧzel finds, from culture “or whatever it is that is speaking to them negatively about what girls should and should not be doing.”
In her work, Ӧzel is not looking to understand why the universe exists; she is far more concerned with how bizarre things like black holes can be out there, and what else can be learned about them.
Research “is always open-ended, and sometimes it’s grinding work, small steps at a time. And once in a while, it is a real breakthrough, and you have a better understanding of something — a new result, a new way of calculating, or a new way of understanding the data — and you know, it keeps you going for a while through the more grinding work,” Ӧzel said for the oral history interview.
Audiences tend to ask her big-picture questions, which makes sense given the wonder, awe and marvel involved in her work. But that’s not what’s intellectually interesting to her.
“I don’t think science asks, ‘Why?’ Science is about the ‘How?’ If we can explain how certain things happen and build a framework that is predictive, that’s the basis of science,” Ӧzel told the American Institute of Physics. “I don’t ask about if or how things were created. That, to me, is not the interesting part of science. And certainly, our tools aren’t designed to answer that. So, we’ll leave that to philosophers.”
