BURCIN MUTLU-PAKDIL: When you are just alone with the stars,
it is an undescribable moment.
Some of the lights are coming from 10 billion
light years away.
So we are really seeing the first stars,
and I feel like astronomy allows us to time travel.
I shared my discovery my family, and they didn't react much.
Then the media started to cover it,
and then my parents and my sister starts calling--
OK, what did you do, really?
Everyone was asking about this discovery-- what's going on?
And I was saying, I have been talking about this for months,
and now you are asking me.
I am Burcin Mutlu-Pakdil, and I am an astrophysicist.
And I study how galaxies form and evolve.
My grandparents didn't have an opportunity
to learn to read and write.
For my parents, at that time in Turkey women
helped with the household, got married, and had families.
Mom basically followed that trend.
They didn't have role models.
They didn't know how to dream about bigger things.
As long as I can remember myself,
I was always so curious.
And I said I want to be the cleverest person in the world.
And I asked my sister, who is the cleverest person
in the world?
And my sister said, maybe Einstein.
I learned more about physics and space,
and I became obsessed about black holes especially.
But I wasn't sure.
I could do astronomy as a job, because I didn't see many role
models around me.
I did my undergrad degree at Ankara,
the capitol city of Turkey.
The first day I met with one of the faculty members,
and he basically said, you are woman,
and you are planning to study physics.
Are you sure?
Are you crazy?
He basically challenged me with this question,
and I didn't know how to react.
I kept going, but it was so challenging.
And at the time, there was a hijab ban overall in Turkey.
Several protests were going on, and for my parents,
they were so worried about that, they
didn't want me to practice hijab.
I was using hats and other stuff to cover
certain parts of my body.
But you know, this really alienates you from everyone--
like, you feel awkward among your peers.
So I decided to do my higher education in America.
When I walked in my graduation ceremony,
the university was live streaming it.
And my parents were all watching it.
They were so proud of it.
Being yourself, expressing yourself freely,
is an incredible freedom.
And I really needed that.
Especially when you are dealing with the biggest questions.
You need to free all these distractions.
You should be comfortable to just focus
on these big questions.
I really want to understand how galaxies form,
and what is the nature of dark matter.
Galaxies are systems of stars, planets, black holes, and gas,
all grouped together by dark matter.
80% of matter is dark matter.
We cannot observe it.
We only know its existence through its effect
on regular matter.
And since it makes most of the universe,
it really plays a fundamental role in galaxy formation.
Dwarf galaxies are the most dark matter dominated systems.
And these galaxies might only host thousands or hundreds
of stars, compared to Milky Way with billions of stars.
We think they might be the first galaxies formed ever.
15 years ago, we only knew of a dozen dwarf galaxies.
And now this number reaches around 60,
and we expect to even discover hundreds of dwarf galaxies
that are not Milky Way.
Each dark matter model predicts a different number
of dwarf galaxies.
How many we discover might help us
understand how dark matter particles interact
with each other.
We are connected to the Tololo Observatory in Chile.
I am already just waiting for the control.
Hi.
SPEAKER 1: OK, go ahead Burcin.
You have control.
BURCIN MUTLU-PAKDIL: Now we are controlling all machines there.
I have all this cool information about temperature, humidity,
pressure, wind.
When the conditions are good, we directly point our telescope
to that direction.
So since it is really competitive and expensive
to use these telescopes, every second matters.
For the first time, we will be able to cover the southern sky
with enough depth that we will be
able to reach the faint stars.
And we will be able to discover the faintest ultra-faint dwarf
galaxies that aren't Milky Way.
These dots over here, these are stars.
Being part of the process of uncovering new knowledge,
it is undescribable satisfaction.
When I first published my paper--
a scientific paper--
I felt like I had a new baby.
Everything started when our team was observing, approximately
10 years ago, a spiral galaxy.
And what was this peculiar system in the background--
a very symmetric system.
Generally rings form when two galaxies crash.
This kind of wild interactions creates
a lot of asymmetries and connections
between ring and central body.
But In this galaxy, basically it's
so symmetric that in between the central body
and the outer ring, there is no connection.
And I said, I really want to do a detailed study on that.
I basically modeled the central bright structure,
looking [? at ?] intense light to see if there's
anything hidden in it.
The first time that I realized that, oh my god,
there is another ring here.
And I said, no, no, no, no.
There should be something else.
It is really rare to have an outer ring.
Now we have an inner ring and a new structure that
wasn't supposed to be there.
We haven't seen anything like that before.
So what we need now is to really pinpoint
what is the nature of this inner ring,
and try to understand and make sense of its existence.
Finding this system in the background--
by chance-- It was an amazing experience.
This galaxy is commonly referred to as Burcin's galaxy now.
Discovering an extremely rare galaxy is a big deal.
We find new common galaxies all the time.
It is normal.
Finding challenging and puzzling new systems
are important because this pushes
us to design new experiments and refine our models.
Like dark matter, these extreme objects
force us to think outside the box.
When I decided I will study astronomy,
I will go to America, I will do work for NASA,
or I will go to space, become an astronaut--
when I talked about this, my parents
were thinking OK, yeah, you will do it.
The most important part of being a scientist is not to give up.
This is a process.
We are gathering drops of knowledge together,
and each one, at the end, will inform our big questions.
If you keep searching, space is full of mystery.
So eventually, you will find something new.