Oddisey Knox: Traverser of Deep Time

During her time as an undergraduate at the University of Arizona, Oddisey Knox wrote her own program to sort and organize black holes by their luminosity. Together with Peter Behroozi, she is using models to predict how black holes group together. Then, they match those predictions against observational astronomy to better understand the behavior of these cosmic phenomena. Current instrumentation makes it hard to identify dimmer pairs of black holes, and that’s where Knox’s programming comes in. Theoretical work like Knox’s can help hone in on answers that we will ultimately need next-generation telescopes to confirm. If the models are accurate (and thus far they are), it means that Knox’s program might ultimately help save astronomers some of the expense of telescope observation time. In the midst of coding and computation, Knox still holds space for the mind-boggling reality of what she’s studying: colossal collapsed stars across “gargantuan distances.”

When she arrived on campus in 2020 as a transfer student, Knox knew she wanted to be involved in black hole research. She spent days scouring the faculty list and eventually wrote an email to Peter Behroozi: “I was so apprehensive to approach anyone,” she recalls. “I always thought, well, the skills I have just don't match.” Instead of letting that stop her, she spent every day after classes learning Python so that she could build a program to slot into the research Behroozi was doing. He encouraged her through her learning curve, sending her customized coding challenges, and he and Gurtina Besla both supported Knox unwaveringly when life complicated her research schedule—through the tumult of transferring schools, raising a child, learning coding, and navigating a pandemic. “I cannot overstate how important that was to me finally getting somewhere” Knox says. “Life is happening every single day. So when things come up, you want to know that the people you work for understand it and sympathize.” Steadfast mentorship under Steward Observatory faculty meant that Knox finished her final class this summer after eight years of college work. She graduates this month with a minor in Astronomy and a major in Geosciences.

Her work on Behroozi’s research team will continue, as well as geology research that seeks to understand the mysteries of Paleozoic rocks layers in the Grand Canyon. It’s not surprising that Knox is drawn to the puzzle of the earth’s early days as well to cosmic phenomena from the young universe—both of which inspire an appreciation for deep time. What drives Knox to excel in both fields is “just plain curiosity about how things might have looked in the past and how they might have gotten there.” Studying long-ago events that can’t be seen with the eye requires an act of imagination, and “it’s all very beautiful.” As for the connection between her studies, Knox says “we're all just a system within a system. So, astronomy is separate from geology, yes. But we're on a planet in the solar system, and that solar system resides somewhere in a galaxy.”  The interconnection “keeps me straddling both, equally excited.”

In the year ahead, Knox can be found playing tennis, beginning to build her own computer, and operating the mass spectrometer and the electron microscope as full-time staff at the LaserChron Center.