There are objects in the known universe so strange and unlike anything we know that anyone who wants to study them has to be fairly fluent in Einstein’s general theory of relativity, be comfortable around supercomputers and know how to outfit a telescope with X-ray vision.

Feryal Ozel, a University of Arizona professor of astronomy and physics, checks off on all of the above. She is fascinated by neutron stars and black holes and has made it her career to help us wrap our heads around some of the mysteries enshrouding — sometimes literally — those freaks of nature lurking in the abyss of space.

This month, Ozel was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship “on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise,” by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Overall, 175 fellows were selected this year, from a pool of nearly 3,000 applicants.

“I was thrilled when I learned that I was selected,” Ozel says. “I was grateful for the recognition, I was grateful for the support that comes with the fellowship, and once I learned that I’m the only astronomy and astrophysics fellow this year, I was even more thrilled.”

The fellowship — titled “An incisive look at neutron stars and black holes” — will allow Ozel to focus more time and resources on two main areas of her work: NICER, a NASA-funded instrument to be mounted on the International Space Station next year that will measure the pulsed emission from the surfaces of neutron stars; and the Event Horizon Telescope, a global network of telescopes linked to function as if it were one Earth-size observatory. The EHT is poised to peer through the gas and dust of our Milky Way to observe the supermassive black hole suspected to be at the galaxy’s center.

The timing of the fellowship couldn’t be better, Ozel says, as both projects are set to culminate in 2016-2017, and the first scientific data will start pouring in.

“We’re gearing up to take the closest look we ever have of these phenomenal and weird objects,” she says.

In the case of black holes, the closest look one could get would be the event horizon, the “surface” of the black hole beyond which gravity is so great that matter gets crushed out of existence and things get so weird that even seasoned astrophysicists admit that, theoretically, anything could be possible there. In the case of neutron stars, no one has yet managed to catch a glimpse of their actual surfaces, where gravity and velocity (depending on the star’s spin) are vastly beyond anything that could be created or observed on Earth.

Neutron stars, scientists surmise, are the densest forms matter can take. They are formed when a star sheds its outer layers in a cosmic explosion known as a supernova, and what is left collapses onto itself under the crushing force of gravity. In many cases, neutron stars aren’t much bigger than a city but contain much of the matter that used to be in a star the size of our sun.

“The core of a neutron star has a density approximately 10 times the density of atomic nuclei,” Ozel explains. “There is no way we can re-create such conditions on Earth, so we don’t know what happens to the stuff that once made up the star. For example, does matter dissolve into quarks? We have no idea, no concept of what happens there.”

Ozel’s work has shown that looking at the diameters of these star remnants is one of the most promising ways to figure out what happens to matter at such high densities. Some neutron stars called pulsars emit radio waves and can be detected with radio telescopes (listen to a pulsar here). But the ones that Ozel is interested in broadcast their presence in subtler ways.

“Those neutron stars are hot enough to emit X-ray radiation,” she says. “By studying the properties of this radiation, we can measure the size of those objects.”

In other cases, where the neutron star spins on its axis, an observer standing far away sees changes in emissions from brighter and darker areas. Ozel has been working on ways to use general relativity on that information to figure out how big the star is.

But how do you get an image of a black hole, the blackest of all black objects? Not even light can escape its immense gravity.

Rather than trying to get a glimpse of the black hole itself, Ozel and her colleagues train their telescopes on the accretion disc — a hot, swirling whirl of matter circling the black hole like water circling the drain that shines in a big, bright mix of emissions of all kinds of wavelengths.

“‘What is the wavelength we should be looking at if we want to see all the way to the event horizon?'” Ozel says. “That’s the question we’re trying to answer, and one way we do that is through three-dimensional, time-dependent simulations of the accretion disc.”

The computer simulations that have resulted from this research are not only full of scientific insight, but full of beauty, too (watch one here). To obtain data that they can feed into their models, scientists such as Ozel have been busy assembling the EHT, which is nearing its completion and is expected to begin peering at the black hole in our Milky Way in 2017.

“Our understanding of these objects has increased greatly over the past few years,” Ozel says. “Each time we make observations, we learn a bit, then we predict something, then, when the next observations come, we learn a bit more — it’s a nice process of give and take.”

According to the Guggenheim Foundation, Ozel was selected based on her pioneering contributions to the physics of neutron stars and black holes, as well as to the co-evolution of black holes and galaxies in the early universe. Ozel, who holds a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Harvard University, joined the UA as a Hubble Fellow in 2003 and became a faculty member two years later.

The Guggenheim Fellowship program remains an important source of support for artists, scholars in the humanities and social sciences, and scientific researchers. Since its establishment in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has granted more than $334 million in fellowships to more than 18,000 individuals, among whom are scores of Nobel laureates, Fields Medalists, Turing Award winners, poets laureate, members of the various national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, and other important, internationally recognized honors.