I picked this field because I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, where I admired the night sky from the desert, and knew that I wanted to learn more about science and math to describe what I saw.
In the astronomy and astrophysics field, there are many different subjects you could focus on. For example, at college, I worked on projects with exoplanets (planets outside of our galaxy), black holes, the early universe and dark matter (invisible stuff in space that makes up the universe).
When I applied to research astrophysics in Italy, I had to pick a topic in astronomy that the scientists in Bologna were knowledgable in. I work with Dr. Emanuele Dalessandro, an expert in globular clusters, which are large and ancient groups of stars. He focuses on studying these clusters for traces of black holes, an object that has such strong gravity that light cannot escape it.
When astronomers study the history of galaxies and the universe, there are existing theories for how these globular clusters formed, and we can learn more about stars from space telescopes. Because these clusters are so ancient, there are different objects that can be found inside of them. One of these is the type of black hole that I'm searching for, called an intermediate-mass black hole. This is a special name for a medium sized black hole. You may have heard of super-massive black holes which are huge black holes that live in the center of galaxies. Very small black holes are created from the explosion of ancient stars. Medium-sized black holes exist in between these two sizes.
