12:00–1:00 pm ERC 401
Carl Rodriguez, Harvard, "How Do You Form a Binary Black Hole?"
When an isolated binary black hole merges in the field of a galaxy, its gravitational-wave story is complete. But when black holes merge in a dense star cluster, their merger products can remain in the cluster, where they continue to participate in dynamical encounters, form binaries, and potentially merge again. In this talk I will describe the production of repeated mergers in globular clusters, and how the rate of mergers depends on the initial properties (e.g. spin) of black holes formed from stars. I will show how these "second-generation" black holes differ from black holes formed from stellar collapse, and how Advanced LIGO and Virgo can already distinguish these unique astrophysical populations.