Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, October 23, 2013 –Almost every galaxy has at its core a supermassive black hole, millions of times more massive than our sun, each gravitationally dictating the fate of its host. Though black holes reveal much about gravity and its effects on the visible universe, actually testing them has been impossible – until now. 

On Wednesday, November 6, 2013, as part of Perimeter Institute’s Public Lecture Series presented by Sun Life Financial, Perimeter Associate Faculty member Avery Broderick will explore how astronomers are now imaging the horizons of black holes, attaining new insights about these enigmatic monsters in the dark.

Theoretical astrophysicist Avery Broderick is an Associate Faculty member at Perimeter Institute and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Waterloo. He completed his PhD at Caltech in 2004, under the supervision of Prof. Roger Blandford. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics from 2004-2007, and then a Senior Research Associate at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) from 2007-2011. Broderick has broad interests in astrophysics, ranging from how stars form to the extreme physics in the vicinity of white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. He has recently been part of an international effort to produce and interpret horizon-resolving images of a handful of supermassive black holes. With these, Broderick and his collaborators study how black holes accrete matter, launch the ultra-relativistic outflows observed, and probe the nature of gravity in their vicinity.

Broderick’s lecture, entitled “Staring Into the Abyss”, will be held on Wednesday, November 6 at 7:00 PM ET in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Please visit Perimeter’s website for further details. You can view past public lectures and events online here.

Further details can be found at www.perimeterinstitute.ca.