University of Arizona College of Science: Feryal Özel

Jan 13, 2019

College of Science Featured Speaker

By Sara Hammond UA College of Science

For theoretical astrophysicist Feryal Özel, black holes provide a path to answering physics questions that otherwise haven’t been answered.

Özel is a leader of the worldwide Event Horizon Telescope experiment — currently a network of nine radio telescopes across the globe that operate as one Earth-sized array. This spring, the UA will be adding another telescope to the array and operating three of the 10.

The team’s goal is to produce the first-ever image of a black hole, and their first target is a supermassive black hole 53 million light years away in the M87 galaxy.

To achieve the extremely high angular resolution needed for that image, all of the telescopes point to the source at the same time and record data in unison. What they are likely to “see” is a shadow characteristic of a black hole.

“This is an unprecedented experiment in terms of spread-out resources, data and people,” she says.