Conférence du vendredi 16 janvier 2026

Daryl Haggard (McGill) - Imaging Variable Supermassive Black Holes

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 Event Horizon Telescope image of Sgr A* and complementary observations from the James Webb Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, NuSTAR and others. 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.

Bio : Dr. Daryl Haggard is an Associate Professor of Physics at McGill University in the Trottier Space Institute at McGill, where she holds a Canada Research Chair in Multi-messenger Astrophysics and the Arthur B. McDonald Fellowship. Haggard is an Astronomer who studies the Galactic Center and Sagittarius A*, electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave sources, accreting compact objects, and supermassive black holes and their host galaxies, using multi-wavelength and time domain surveys. She completed her PhD in Astronomy at the University of Washington in Seattle, an MSc in Physics at San Francisco State University, and a BA in Liberal Arts at St. John’s College - Santa Fe.