...where the Universe is our laboratory.
The Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics (WCA) looks to the cosmos to solve the greatest mysteries of the universe. Here, world-class researchers and students come together in an atmosphere of curiosity, creativity and collaboration; exploring our cosmic origin to truly understand the physical processes at work in the Universe. From black holes to cosmology, we aim to understand what lies beyond the Earth. The possibilities for new discovery are limitless.
News
What to spot in the sky this year
There's lots to see in the night sky this year, so we've taken a look at all the events you don't want to miss in 2025!
Prize winning paper!
Chloe Cheng was one of the two winners of the 2023-2024 WCA Student Paper Prize. Here, she summarizes her prize-winning paper for us.
One year later: tracking the evolution of a black hole
After sharing the world’s first images of a black hole with the world in 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team recently released a follow-up to the 2024 paper reporting on the results from the 2018 observations of M87* entitled “The persistent shadow of the supermassive black hole of M87”.
Events
Astroseminar - Veronika Dornan - CANCELLED
Veronika Dornan is a final-year PhD candidate in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at McMaster University. Her research uses observations of galaxies' globular star cluster systems as tracers of their evolutionary histories. She is particularly interested in studying the globular cluster system mass - halo mass scaling relation and understanding what drives this relation from dwarf galaxies to massive ellipticals galaxies.
WCA-KPL Public Talk - A Standard Ruler to Measure the Universe: From the Big Bang to the Present Day (Will Percival)
The Universe is big – so big that measuring its size is incredibly difficult. By mapping out the positions of galaxies, cosmologists can trace the structure of the Universe, observing patterns in this structure that can be used as a ruler. In this month’s KPL astronomy talk, Dr. Will Percival will talk about this technique, called Baryon Acoustic Oscillations, highlighting how we came to learn that the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate.
Astroseminar - Erik Osinga
Dr. Erik Osinga is a postdoctoral fellow at the Dunlap Institute. He completed his PhD at Leiden University in 2023. Erik's work centres on understanding how magnetic fields and particle acceleration shape the environments within and around galaxy clusters.