The lives and deaths of star clusters, and the black holes they make along the way

Abstract:

The life cycles of star clusters are an integral part of the formation of galaxies and their black hole populations.  In these dense stellar environments, stars and black holes participate in complicated dynamical interactions that can create many unique objects, such as detached black hole binaries, hypervelocity stars, and gravitational-wave sources.  In this talk, I will review our current
understanding of the evolution of dense star clusters in the Milky Way, and their complicated relationship with their black hole populations. 

I will then describe a project to self-consistently evolve star clusters formed in a high-resolution MHD simulation of a Milky Way-mass galaxy, from their formation from collapsing giant molecular clouds to their destruction by galactic tidal fields.  Finally, I will show how the birth conditions of these star clusters create massive black holes- --from the 30 solar mass binaries detected by LIGO and Gaia to the ever illusive intermediate-mass black holes.
 

Bio:

Carl is originally from Shreveport, Louisiana, and is at UNC Chapel Hill since January 2023.  Before that, he was an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, a position he had for two years after postdoctoral fellowships at MIT and Harvard.  He completed his PhD in 2016 from Northwestern University, working with Fred Rasio on the evolution of star clusters and the formation of binary black holes, and received his BA in Physics from Reed College in 2010.

Learn More:

• See his faculty webpage at the University of North Carolina: https://physics.unc.edu/people/rodriguez-carl/ 
• Read this department bio of all members of the "Stars, Stellar Dynamics, Black Holes and Gravitational Waves at UNC":  https://dynamics.unc.edu/who-we-are/

Links:

• LIGO - The U.S. National Science Foundation Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (NSF LIGO), was designed to open the field of gravitational-wave astrophysics through the direct detection of gravitational waves predicted by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Our multi-kilometer-scale gravitational wave detectors use laser interferometry to measure the minute ripples in space-time caused by passing gravitational waves from cataclysmic cosmic events such as colliding neutron stars or black holes, or by supernovae: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/ 
• Gaia: an extraordinarily precise three-dimensional map of more than a thousand million stars throughout our Milky Way galaxy and beyond: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Gaia