Turkish woman professor among scientists who revealed first photo of black hole
Razi Canikligil-NEW YORK
Turkish professor Feryal Özel is one of the members of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration which on April 10 announced a milestone in astrophysics: The first-ever photo of a black hole.
“This has been our first chance to see the inner workings of black holes and to test a fundamental prediction of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. Not only the existence of a shadow that indicates a point of no return — or an event horizon — but also the size and shape of that shadow,” Özel, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona, told ABC News on April 10.
“It’s a dream come true, on many levels,” Özel said. “Something I’ve been working on for many, many years, trying to build a physical model of a black hole environment and predictions, and the opportunity to study the hearts of black holes is amazing. This kind of resolution in astronomy is unprecedented. This is up to a million times better than some other telescopes.”
It wasn’t until late summer 2018 that “we knew we had an image that looked like what we hoped it would look like. Just collecting data, just getting the data from the South Pole — just that took six months. It was close to a year and half we just worked on it,” Özel said.
The EHT collaboration involves more than 200 researches from Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America.
The team member Özel is a theoretical astrophysicist whose primary research interests include the physics of neutron stars and black holes, as well as the formation of supermassive black holes and galaxies in the early Universe.
