How One Astrophysicist Is Charting The Unseen And Rewriting What We Know About Black Holes

Expert Hunts For Invisible Black Holes

When Kareem El-Badry picked up an unknown phone call at 7 a.m., he didn’t expect to hear the words that would change his career. “They said, this is so and so from the MacArthur Foundation. And I was like, are they asking for money? I didn’t know very much about it.”

He soon learned it wasn’t a scam. It was the call that would name him one of this year’s MacArthur Fellows, a recognition often referred to as the “genius grant.”

“It’s validation that the community finds useful some of the research that I’m doing,” he reflected. “It gives me more confidence in taking more risks and trying things that are more exciting, but that have a higher chance of failure.”

The Beauty of Interconnectedness

El-Badry, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology, focuses on binary stars (pairs of stars that form together and orbit one another) and how these relationships allow astronomers to view otherwise "unseen" mass in space. “One of the cool things about binary stars,” he explained, “is that if one of the stars becomes a black hole, then we can still study it by noticing its gravitational effects on the companion star that's still alive.”

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It’s this indirect observation that allows him to find what has proven elusive to most other researchers. Using high-precision data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, El-Badry searches for stars whose movements reveal the invisible presence of black holes.

El-Badry sees the universe not as a collection of isolated objects, but as a vast web of relationships. “Everything in space is interacting with everything else in some way,” he said. “It’s actually very unusual for stars to be totally isolated.”

That interconnectedness, he said, is what makes the cosmos fascinating. "As soon as you add another star or any kind of companion, it gets much more complex and there’s much more interesting things that can happen.”

What Others Don’t See

El-Badry’s approach often involves revisiting data that’s been available for years and finding what others missed. “I think it’s something I’ve picked up over the last five or six years just by building intuition,” he said. “Sometimes you find something that just makes you think, like, hmm, I'm surprised to see that.”

“That's kind of when you get excited because you think there must be some new information here," he explained.

It’s that ability to see patterns where others don’t that has defined his career. For El-Badry, it's as simple as using Google Maps. "You can zoom out and you see the whole Earth, or you can pick one little place and then zoom in, so you can see street signs and stuff," he clarified. "We have basically the same thing but for the sky looking up. In some parts of the sky, we've looked with bigger telescopes so we can zoom in farther."

The next great mystery, he says, lies in our own galaxy. “We think there should be between 100 million and a billion black holes in the Milky Way, but we only know of like 20 or 30 of them,” he said. “We’d like to understand what’s out there.”

Looking Up

For those who simply gaze at the night sky, El-Badry hopes his research can help them to appreciate more than just its beauty, that they’ll imagine the motion, the drama and the hidden stories behind those faint points above.

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“They’re not just pretty lights,” he said. “Many of them are doing something interesting. Many of the brightest stars that we can see with the naked eye are binaries. Some of them are binaries that are currently transferring mass from one star to another. Some of them are pulsating and getting brighter and fainter on human time scales. Some of them are almost certainly orbited by black holes that we can't see.”

As for the cosmic mysteries that keep him up at night: “There's more basic things about the universe and astronomy that we don't understand than that we do," he admitted. “You're lucky if you can make some progress on one of them.”

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