Hunting stellar zombies in the galactic backyard

Eduardo Vitral (STScI)

June 29, 2023

–

Abstract: After a star burns all of its available fuel, it becomes a compact object, namely a white dwarf, neutron star or a black hole. Among the best places to look for those objects are the centers of globular star clusters (GCs) in our Milky Way. Indeed, because of their very dense environments, the interplay between stellar evolution and dynamical interactions allows GCs to serve as laboratories for a vast number of interesting astrophysical phenomena. For instance, one may consider the formation of black-hole mergers with components in the proposed pair-instability mass gap, gravitational waves, formation of compact black hole-luminous star binaries, stellar-mass tidal disruption events, Type Ia supernovae, formation of young neutron stars and fast radio bursts, and finally, intermediate-mass black holes. In this talk, I will present the latest efforts from my collaborators and I to recover the shape and composition of GCs’ stellar remnant populations from stellar dynamics, using exquisite data from Hubble, Gaia, and Monte Carlo numerical simulations.