Event Details

In this talk, Dr. Maccarone will discuss observations of black hole and neutron star X-ray binaries in our own Galaxy and nearby galaxies. The primary focus will be on the globular cluster sources, and particularly on recent work showing strong evidence for stellar mass black holes in globular clusters -- why for a long time it was thought that clusters would not host stellar mass black holes, how the observations changed our view of the situation, and what recent theoretical developments have resulted to explain the observations. He will also discuss why the presence of such black hole X-ray binaries is of great importance for prospects of discovering gravitational wave sources, and how these might be used to address certain problems in structure formation. Also discussed will be, some implications of the numbers of non-cluster binaries for recent claims of extreme initial mass function variations, and some results on globular clusters that have implications for our understanding of stellar population synthesis modelling.

Video Recording