A recent detection of flares found to be encircling black holes has proven correctly a theory co-proposed by Canadian astrophysicist Avery Broderick more than a decade ago. “It’s extremely exciting to see our theoretical musing come to life and that tracking these types of flares about black holes is possible,” says Broderick, an Associate Faculty member at Perimeter Institute and the University of Waterloo.

The recent GRAVITY Collaboration discovery involved the detection of three flares that were found to be emanating from the black hole known as Sagittarius A*. Picking up on a flutter of emissions coming from the flares, the team detected the black hole’s growing orbit, otherwise known as its accretion disk.





It was Broderick and his colleague Avi Loeb who first predicted these flares 13 years ago while working together at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). Their earlier papers on the matter outlined computer models and bought to light their proposal that the flares were caused by the merging of two major events: the generation of magnetic reconfiguration hot spots and the bending of light around the black hole.

“Black holes are gravitational masters of their domain, and anything that drifts too close will be blended into a superheated disk of plasma surrounding them,” says Broderick. “The matter trapped in the black hole’s growing retinue then flows towards the event horizon – the point at which no light can escape – and consumed by the black hole via mechanisms that aren’t fully yet understood.”





Thanks to new technologies, the lives of black holes are becoming much clearer today. Broderick is hopeful that these discoveries will, in fact, help to “unlock the nature of gravity” someday and that we won’t have too long to wait until that happens.

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