A s intergalactic zombies––that eat their sister stars and wander galaxies like the walking dead––neutron stars and black holes have all the makings of a hit movie.

Now, there’s a “first-of-its-kind” map showing exactly where these roaming corpses of stars were born and how far they’ve traveled, thanks to a Georgia College professor and a string of physics students over the past seven years.

“This type of research is typically done at Harvard or UC Berkeley. So,” Bodaghee said, “it’s kind of surprising to see Georgia College students taking the lead. That’s because I brought some of this data with me from my Ph.D. 20 years ago, and we’ve been updating it ever since.”

The difference between a neutron star and black hole is the mass of its weight. Both are born from brilliant explosions of dying stars, much larger than our sun. But black holes are denser and less frequent.

Like many young boys, Bodaghee dreamed of becoming an astronaut. He ended up majoring in astronomy and––when looking for a research project for his Ph.D. at the University of Geneva in Switzerland––he ‘fell into’ black holes. That subject was open, and he’s been studying the cosmic phenomena ever since.

Since 2014, four Georgia College students have helped Bodaghee chart neutron stars within the Small Magellanic Cloud. It’s a companion galaxy bound to the Milky Way by gravitational pull. The group just published their map and a research paper on the speed of neutron stars in that galaxy.

The next step is to update a map of the Milky Way that Bodaghee created in 2012. Scientists estimate there are tens of thousands of neutron stars and black holes in the Milky Way.

Eventually, the two maps will be put on Wikipedia so people and scientists all over the world can access them, update information and make edits. Bodaghee and Georgia College will maintain a controlling interest in the page.

“Neutron stars and black holes are extremely exotic,” Bodaghee said. “Extreme is the best word to describe them.”

His face lights up when talking about these celestial vacuums, born in “nesting areas” throughout a galaxy.

When stars more massive than our sun die, there’s a supernova explosion. The enormous blast creates and ejects a core of gravity. These objects move through space, consuming their twin star and anything else in their path as fuel. Eventually, these “high mass X-ray binaries” get smaller and smaller and disappear, leaving what Bodaghee calls “ripples in the fabric of spacetime.”

Detecting and tracking these stellar globetrotters is difficult. In the past, it was also slow-going. To create the Small Magellanic Cloud map, Bodaghee and his students had to locate one neutron star at a time. They did this by combing through publications and websites to find last-known distances from the sun.

Even that was only guesswork.

“I didn’t know when starting out,” Bodaghee said, “that computers would play such a big part. Today, the Hubble and X-ray telescopes are constantly observing the sky with tons of data coming in. People don’t have time to sift through all that. It can’t be done by hand, like in the old days.”

Then, Bodaghee met Cody Cox of Milledgeville. Cox started out as a computer science major at Georgia College but was looking for something more challenging. He switched to physics with a minor in mathematics––and his technological knowhow has proved invaluable.

An expert in C++ computer language, Cox quickly learned a more complicated program called MATLAB. He’s written a few thousand lines of MATLAB code that extracts data on the distance of neutron stars and black holes from published catalogs, then computes the information onto a graph. He also wrote another few thousand lines of code that can update stellar maps––pinpointing where these heavenly bodies have moved.

The Milky Way chart shows a spiral of red triangles––indicating where neutron stars and black holes are currently located––and blue circles for stellar nurseries where they were born. In the Milky Way, about 95 percent of triangles represent neutron stars and 5 percent black holes.

“In a nutshell,” Bodaghee said, “you’re looking at the most accurate map of high-mass X-ray binaries ever made. Crazy to think it was produced here at Georgia College, and that nobody else anywhere has anything close to it.”

Cox’s program saves a huge amount of time, while also being more precise. What used to take Bodaghee six months to a year to accomplish took Cox one week.

To do what Cox has done, Bodaghee said, would take a Ph.D. student years to achieve.

Cox did it last year as a junior in college, mostly in his free time.

“Think of Cody as a more efficient version of me,” Bodaghee said, laughing. “He can go onto the Web archives, extract the information and put it onto a table. He’s the most motivated student I’ve ever encountered.”

During his senior year, Cox will finish the Milky Way map. Once done, the two maps can be overlaid to show similarities and differences in neutron stars and black holes. The maps could determine if and why collapsed cores from separate galaxies move at different speeds. They might also indicate the life cycle of these entities and how far they migrate before fizzling out.

Cox transferred to Georgia College precisely for opportunities like this. He likes the statistical correlation of astronomy research and finding patterns in the data.

In addition to working on neutron stars and black holes, Cox is also the proud discoverer of a previously unknown luminous object, a quasar “a billion times the size of our sun” he named “IGR-12-346.”

“This level of undergraduate research just isn’t available elsewhere,” Cox said. “There’s such a close connection between the professors and the students here that allows a level of research you can’t find anywhere else.”

“Before I got into college,” he said, “I didn’t know I’d be doing this kind of work. It’s given me an appreciation of all the work that goes into astronomy. People just think of it as looking into a telescope and seeing pretty pictures. But there’s so much more that goes into it. I have a lot of respect for the people who do this full time. It’s incredible.”

Cox hopes to get a master’s in data science and work at Google or Microsoft.

His research with Bodaghee is great preparation toward that goal.