By Jeff Hunter ’96

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There are objects in space so dense not even light can escape from them.

The gravity of these objects creates a boundary, called the event horizon, beyond which no matter or energy can escape.

But black holes don’t take Maria Rodriguez to a dark place. In fact, a smile breaks out across her face and her countenance quickly brightens when discussing recent research breakthroughs involving these mysterious cosmic bodies.

“So many things have happened in just the last 10 years that this is now the Platinum Era of black holes thanks to all the data we’re getting,” says Rodriguez, an associate professor of physics in Utah State University’s College of Science. “From the time I started studying black holes to now, I am just thrilled that this is happening. This is like the Disneyland of black holes.”

Rodriguez, who grew up just outside of Buenos Aires, has taught in the Physics Department since January 2016. On her desk in her office in the Science Engineering Research Building, she has two framed photographs: one of herself and some academic colleagues posing with renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, and one of her two children. But she can see her husband, Oscar Varela, in person practically anytime she wants.

Rodriguez and Varela, who is also an associate physics professor, both secured jobs at USU nine years ago, and their offices are currently located adjacent to each other.

“This is the first time we’ve shared a wall, after being at different institutions together,” Rodriguez notes with a grin.

The couple first met in Italy in 2002. Rodriguez was planning to attend graduate school in the United States after completing an undergraduate degree in theoretical physics at the National University of La Plata in her hometown of La Plata, Argentina, but she had an opportunity to attend a “physics summer school” shortly afterward at a research center in Italy. A native of Spain, Varela did the same thing as a Ph.D. candidate from Valencia University.

Rodriguez, who already had a scholarship offer from the University of Barcelona, ended up postponing her plans to come to the U.S. and found not only love in Spain, but also an academic focus.

“That’s where I started working on black holes,” she says of her time in the Ph.D. program at Barcelona. “And since 2002, this has been my topic.”

That topic is certainly a unique and fascinating one and something most people have very little knowledge of, outside of what they may glean from movies and television. Black holes usually form when massive stars run out of fuel and collapse violently under their own gravity (stellar-mass black holes), though scientists believe there are four different kinds.

“I have discovered that people are very interested in black holes,” Rodriguez says. “When I go on an airplane or whatever, people ask me, ‘What do you work on?’ And I’ll shyly say, ‘I’m a physicist.’ And they say, ‘Oh, what do you research on?’ I say, ‘black holes.’ And as soon as I do that, the person tells me all they know about black holes.”

The Disney movie The Black Hole was a moderate box office hit in 1979, but the film was considered scientifically inaccurate by physicists. Then there’s the world of animation, which might turn to a black hole for comedic purposes, like when The Simpsons managed to turn a small black hole into a very large black hole by using it as a garbage receptacle. People have long found black holes mysterious and fascinating because they challenge our understanding of physics and reveal the extreme nature of the universe, and, naturally, this has led to them being portrayed in popular culture.

“Not long ago, my son was watching Paw Patrol and there was a big black hole sucking something in, and the little Paw Patrol had to save something from falling into the black hole,” Rodriquez says with a laugh. “Ask your kids about black holes. You’ll be surprised to learn what they know about them.”

Ironically, the Platinum Era of black holes Rodriguez referred to coincides closely with the release of the film Interstellar in 2014. Written and directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway, the science fiction film chronicles the efforts of astronauts to find another habitable planet by traveling through a wormhole and culminates with McConaughey’s character ending up inside a massive black hole known as Gargantua.

Unlike its Disney predecessor, Interstellar was widely praised by the scientific community, primarily due to the presence of well-known theoretical physicist Kip Thorne as an executive producer and scientific consultant. The son of Utah State professors D. Wynne and Alison Thorne, Kip Thorne graduated from Logan High School before leaving Cache Valley to complete college degrees at Caltech and Princeton.

Rodriguez points out that because of Thorne’s contributions and the financial backing of Hollywood, physicists were treated to some of the most complete and detailed likenesses of black holes ever created.

“It was the first time we had these very expensive images, and that’s very accurate to what happens using Einstein’s equations,” Rodriguez says. “These are not pictures in the movie that have been drawn. They’re really solutions of Einstein’s equations. So that was very interesting.”

Just a couple of years after helping guide Nolan through the science of Interstellar, Thorne and two colleagues were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2017, after successfully observing the universe’s gravitational waves for the very first time. Predicted by Albert Einstein over a century ago, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected waves created from the collision between two black holes an estimated 1.3 billion years ago.

“He is our ambassador for communication nowadays about the excitement of black holes,” Rodriguez says of Thorne. “He’s very respected worldwide. I don’t think people in this town understand just how big he is, scientifically.”

Rodriguez says she has met Thorne several times at scientific conferences, most notably at Harvard, the host university for the Black Hole Initiative. Founded in 2016 with Hawking in attendance, the Black Hole Initiative is an interdisciplinary center focused on the study of black holes that combines experts from physics, astronomy, and philosophy. Varela and Rodriguez, who did her postdoc work at Harvard in the early 2010s, went on sabbatical last year to conduct research at the BHI, where they worked alongside the team behind the Event Horizon Telescope.

A global network of radio telescopes, the Event Horizon Telescope captured the first-ever image of a black hole — located 55 million light-years away in the galaxy Messier 87 — in 2019. In addition, in 2022, the EHT attained a photograph of Sagittarius A* (pronounced ey-star), the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy located a mere 26,000 light years from Earth.

And using the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on NASA’s James Webb Telescope, a team of physicists announced in late February they were able to observe unique flares of light orbiting Sagittarius A*, another breakthrough further validating Rodriguez’s belief that while the ’70s was the Golden Era of black hole research due to the contributions of Hawking and others, this current period is the most thrilling time ever for the study of black holes. 

The daughter and granddaughter of physicists, Rodriguez routinely teaches courses at USU involving electromagnetism and thermal physics, as well as a class on black holes when there is sufficient interest from graduate students. She also leads the Gravitational Theory Group, a small research team dedicated to exploring advanced topics in gravitational physics and field theory. The group presented research on black holes at an international science conference in Brazil in 2023.

“I think the enthusiasm, or the encouragement, is mostly finding out more about what black holes are,” Rodriguez exclaims. “There’s a lot of new experiments that are going to happen this decade. That’s how long we plan experiments now. And so we’re looking, always, for new students and a new Hawking that would come into the field and resolve things. So, it has been exciting.”