The researcher of the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona Mark Gieles, will offer the outreach talk “A population of black holes at the globular cluster Palomar 5” to the Astronomical Society of Sabadell next Wednesday, October 13 at 19h. In this talk, he will discuss the results recently presented in the prestigious magazine Nature Astronomy here a group of researchers led by prof Gieles discovered hints that the unique features of the globular cluster Palomar 5 are due to a population of more than 100 black holes nested at its centre.
During the talk, he will present and explain the results of the N-body simulations of the objects of the cluster and he will show that the two most distinctive characteristics of Palomar 5 could result from this unusual concentration of stellar-mass black holes, which represents approximately 20% of its total mass.
About the author
Mark Gieles is an ICREA professor and an astronomer at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences, where he researches about the formation and evolution of stellar clusters, with the aim of deepening our knowledge about the stellar initial mass function, black holes, gravitational waves and the dark matter distribution in galaxies. He has also proposed models to detect black holes in star clusters, through data obtained with the Gaia satellite and other space surveys, and models of the formation of these same star clusters.