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Arizona Astrophysicist Feryal Ozel Named Guggenheim Fellow

neutron star
(Photo courtesy of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center)
A neutron star is the densest object astronomers can observe directly, crushing half a million times the Earth's mass into a sphere about 12 miles across, or similar in size to Manhattan Island, as shown in this illustration.

A University of Arizona astrophysicist who searches for distant, alien objects in the universe is a new Guggenheim Fellow.

Feryal Ozel is one of 175 scholars selected for achievement and exceptional promise. Three-thousand applied for the awards, and Ozel is the only honoree in astronomy and astrophysics.

She will spend her fellowship year doing studies of compact objects, including the surfaces of neutron stars and black holes.

Professor Ozel is working on an instrument for the International Space Station that will measure emissions from neutron stars. She also is part of a team developing a network of radio telescopes that will observe a massive black hole thought to be at the center of the Milky Way.

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Sara Hammond was a reporter at Arizona Public Media in Tucson from 2015 to 2018.