Hotspot discovery proves professor's black hole theory

The recent detection of flares circling black holes has proven a decade-old theory co-developed by Professor Avery Broderick about how black holes grow and consume matter.

The idea of using the emissions from visual hotspots to map the behaviour of black holes was first suggested by Broderick and Avi Loeb in 2005 when both were working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). 

In a recent study, Broderick has shown how hotspots could be used as visual probes to trace out structures in the accretion disk and spacetime itself.