Radio-emitting compact binaries in Milky Way globular clusters
Globular clusters are dense populations of hundreds of thousands to millions of stars, and were expected to at one point also contain a population of around 1000 stellar-mass black holes. However, theory predicted that as the clusters evolved, these black holes would be ejected from the cluster through gravitational interactions with other black holes, leaving only $\sim$1-2\% of globular clusters with a stellar-mass black hole. Recent research suggests though, that stellar-mass black holes could be far more common in globular clusters. This project aims to investigate the frequency of black holes in globular clusters using radio observations of Milky Way globular clusters from the Very Large Array (VLA), and has the potential to increase the number of known black holes in the Milky Way significantly.This project focuses the search for stellar-mass black holes on cores of globular clusters, where, through dynamical mass-segregation, these black holes are expected to be. Radio observations are increasingly sensitive to low-luminosity accretion onto compact objects, which makes the deep VLA observations ideal for this search. Stellar-mass black hole candidates are identified by their flat spectrum radio emission, and followed up with observations at different wavelengths to confirm that candidates are not accreting neutron stars, white dwarfs, or background galaxies. If stellar-mass black holes are indeed common in globular clusters, this would have significant implications, such as that more accurate study of stellar-mass black holes could be done, and there would be increased chance of the formation of black hole-black hole binaries, which would be important sources of gravitational waves.
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- In Collections
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Electronic Theses & Dissertations
- Copyright Status
- In Copyright
- Material Type
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Theses
- Authors
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Shishkovsky, Laura Katharine
- Thesis Advisors
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Strader, Jay M.
- Committee Members
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Chomiuk, Laura
Zepf, Steve
Tollefson, Kirsten
DeYoung, Tyce
- Date
- 2023
- Subjects
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Astrophysics
- Program of Study
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Astrophysics and Astronomy - Doctor of Philosophy
- Degree Level
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Doctoral
- Language
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English
- Pages
- 160 pages
- Permalink
- https://doi.org/doi:10.25335/ekpq-zg98