From Idaho to Massachusetts to Japan, Fulbright Alumni Ambassador Kylie Dan explores all things related to galaxies—now, she’s mapping supermassive black holes as an astronomy Ph.D. student at UMD.
Growing up in rural Idaho, University of Maryland astronomy Ph.D. student Kylie Dan spent many of her evenings driving out into the desert to stare at the night sky. The darkness there was total, and the stars were overwhelming. It was during one of those nights gazing skyward that something clicked.
“I remember just thinking that space is really the physical limit of our understanding of the world,” she recalled. “I thought that if I studied things far out in space—like galaxies—I’d be truly pushing the limit of our knowledge as humans.”
That quiet revelation carried Dan a long way from Idaho. She began spending her free time at her town’s observatory, competed in science fairs and eventually found her way to MIT, where she earned a physics degree with minors in astronomy and Japanese. From there, Dan received a Fulbright Student Fellowship and spent a year at Hiroshima University in Japan, living and learning among the country’s astronomers.
Today, Dan continues to pursue her passion for space at UMD. Advised by Astronomy Professor Sylvain Veilleux, she uses some of the world’s most powerful telescopes to study how supermassive black holes shape the galaxies around them. Her philosophical approach to pushing the physical boundaries of human knowledge remains a primary motivation for her research.
“It’s fascinating how something so relatively small, like a black hole, can affect something so vast, like an entire galaxy,” Dan said. “It’s a question I always come back to, especially as galaxies form the backbone of matter in our universe. By studying them, we can learn how we got here at the largest scale.”
Studying the smallest force in the largest system
At the heart of most galaxies lies a supermassive black hole. When actively consuming surrounding material, these black holes release enormous feedback energy that ripples outward and shapes how a galaxy grows, cools and forms stars over billions of years. For Dan, studying this feedback is more than just a scientific curiosity; it is also an existential question. Without feedback, galaxies would form stars too fast, burn through their fuel too quickly and leave little material behind for slower, steadier processes that can eventually produce planets, chemistry and life—including humans on Earth.
“I’m interested in learning about how all that feedback, in the form of winds or jets, affects the host galaxy that the supermassive black hole is in,” Dan said. “It’s one of the most pressing questions we have in modern astronomy.”
Dan studies NGC 1275, the largest central galaxy in the Perseus cluster (one of the closest galaxy clusters to our own Milky Way). NGC 1275 has been observed by researchers across nearly every wavelength of light and is dramatic in appearance, with massive filaments of gas trailing outward from its center like streamers.
“Imagine this black hole at the center of a galaxy, inflating these big bubbles of energy that rise and drag material behind them,” Dan said. “The picture we have is generally focused on these large-scale features.”
But Dan’s work goes smaller, zooming into the innermost few thousand light-years around the black hole. Using the W. M. Keck Observatory telescopes in Hawaii, she detected something no one had mapped before: a broad wind of ionized gas being launched directly by the black hole, distinct from the narrow, beam-like jets already known to exist in NGC 1275.
“You can think of the jets as really collimated, very skinny. But the wind is broad, going out in a lot of directions at once,” Dan explained. “Interestingly, at large scales the wind only shows up in ionized gas, not in any other gas phases that scientists can observe.”
By connecting what the black hole is doing up close to larger structures observed further out, Dan’s discovery helps fill in a missing piece of how feedback actually spreads through a galaxy. Thanks to her work, scientists now have the first precise map of where the galactic wind originates, how it’s structured and how much energy it carries.
“NGC 1275 is kind of like a celebrity in the astronomy world. It’s one of the most studied galaxies in the sky because it’s relatively close by,” Dan said. “My close-up measurements of the wind at its source make it possible to test whether the black hole is powerful enough to account for phenomena farther away, serving as a benchmark for understanding similar processes in more distant, harder-to-see systems.”
A bridge between two worlds
Dan credits some of her early research success to her experience as a Fulbright Research Fellow. She conducted preliminary analyses on NGC 1275 at Hiroshima University, giving her a head start on her research at UMD.
“Kylie has already published two first-author papers in the Astrophysical Journal—the premier journal for astronomers,” Veilleux noted. “She’s quickly becoming a well-rounded scholar who will no doubt be highly sought after in the field.”
And the Fulbright program gave Dan more technical expertise.
“I’m half Japanese, but I grew up without speaking the language, which kind of cut me off from an entire side of my family,” she explained. “Six semesters of Japanese were, in part, a bridge back to them. When I actually got there, it was magical because I could get to know them.”
Living and working in Japan also changed how Dan sees science and how scientific culture shapes scientific communication.
“These days, it’s extremely difficult for a single country to build something as big and complex as a telescope,” she said. “These collaborations between countries are really important to how we conduct science today.”
Now, as a Fulbright Alumni Ambassador during the program’s 80th anniversary year, Dan hopes to pass that message on and encourage others to take advantage of the cross-cultural scientific opportunity that meant so much to her. The fellowship is fully funded and open to students in all fields, allowing “anyone with curiosity” a chance to experience life and work abroad.
“UMD has a dedicated program advisor for it, so anyone should give it a try,” Dan said. “As a scientist, the experience really enhanced my approach to my work. In today’s world, international collaboration is more important than ever, and I hope new generations of scientists continue to have the opportunity to experience that.”
