Charity Woodrum

And actually, when I told Dr. Fisher that I wanted to go back to school, during that meeting, he was crying.

And he said, you know, your life is turned completely upside down.

Nothing's the same.

So if you want to come back to the research group, the research group would be exactly the way it was before.

This can be the one spot that never changed.

Hearing him say that was a huge reason I was able to go back.

But when I went back to school, when people would see me for the first time, their eyes would kind of look like a deer in headlights, like, oh, no, what do I say to her?

And also, I looked very different.

I normally wear a lot of bright colors, but I was wearing the same black hoodie and black leggings every day, and I was 15 pounds lighter.

And I think I wanted people to see that I was different now.

I wasn't the same person I was.

But at the same time, seeing their reaction, that was hard.

I'm an extragalactic astronomer, so I study galaxies outside of our own.

And to do that, to find those distant galaxies, what you have to do is exactly what they did with the Hubble Deep Field.

You have to find the darkest part of the sky and look at it.

And that's literally what I do, is just look in the darkest places and try to find light there.

They were massive quiescent galaxies.

And getting the data back, the first scientists that looked at these galaxies found that four of the massive quiescent galaxies had cold gas reservoirs and four of them did not.

Huh.

Yeah.