Into the Deep: Touring a Supermassive Black Hole (or Two!)

Daryl Haggard (McGill University)

Jan 22, 2025 7:00 PM

Location: McConnell Engineering Building 304
Physics Public Talk

It’s been a fantastic decade for black hole studies, particularly for Sagittarius A (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Multiple Galactic Center research groups, the Event Horizon Telescope, and LIGO/Virgo continue to bring rapid-fire new observations to sharpen our understanding of these exotic objects, research highlighted by the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and the 2017 and 2020 Nobel Prizes in Physics. In this talk, I will discuss the new Event Horizon Telescope image of Sgr A*. I’ll describe its unique variability and put it in the context of other time domain phenomena in the Galactic Center, traced out over more than 20 years of observations by coordinated multi-wavelength campaigns. I will compare these studies to equally impressive observations of M87*, the supergiant elliptical galaxy with several trillion stars in the constellation Virgo. I will also briefly explore how we can continue to push the frontiers of black hole research with existing and next-generation observatories.