Finding our galactic centre

May 12, 2022 - A new image from Avery Broderick and the Event Horizon Telescope shows the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way - By Elizabeth Kleisath Faculty of Science - Three years ago, history was made when the first image of a black hole inspired wonder and awe around the world as we glimpsed the shadow of light escaping from the supermassive black hole M87*. Today, history is being made again as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration releases the image of a second black hole - Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) - the one at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy. Among the international group of astronomers behind these images is Professor Avery Broderick from the University of Waterloo. Broderick is a founding member of the EHT and has built theoretical models for the EHT's most promising targets and demonstrated the capacity of the EHT to transform black hole science. As part of the EHT, Broderick's research group has developed powerful new computational tools that analyzed and interpreted the unique data generated by the global array of radio telescopes. With these tools, the EHT has revealed in greater detail than ever before the astrophysical dramas that play out in the vicinity of a black hole's event horizon. "Our image of the first black hole, M87*, was a huge success in science, and has grown into not just a science story, but a human story," says Broderick, also the Delaney Family John Archibald Wheeler Chair of Theoretical Physics at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.