From National Geographic
Turkish-born astrophysicist Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil shares her name with a rare double ring of stars more than 350 million light-years away.
As a child growing up in Turkey, astrophysicist Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil used to enjoy looking up at the stars in the night sky. Little did she know that thanks to her scientific skills, a galaxy sitting 359 million light-years from Earth would one day bear her name.
Mutlu-Pakdil’s lifelong passion for astrophysics was born when she had to prepare an assignment in middle school on an interesting person.
“I asked my sister for suggestions on who I should choose for my assignment, and she suggested Einstein, because he’s the cleverest man in the world,” Mutlu-Pakdil says. She immediately dove into reading about physics and became obsessed with understanding the cosmos. But she encountered obstacles when she chose to do undergraduate studies in physics. For starters, she had to move from her home town of Istanbul to Ankara.
“Even though my family supported my decision and encouraged me to follow my passion, friends and relatives said that girls should not leave home to study,” Mutlu-Pakdil says. A professor at the college also questioned her decision to move cities to study science. Perhaps not surprisingly, she was one of the few female students in her class.
“As a woman studying physics, I felt like an outsider and had to teach myself not to care about the comments and to just focus on my passion.” Also, even though it is not the case anymore, women in Turkey were not allowed to wear the hijab while attending university at the time she was in college.
