Astrophysics Seminar

Globular clusters (GCs) are collections of stars and stellar remnants, held together within a small volume by mutual gravitational attraction. It is established that these clusters are over-abundant in compact binaries: those containing a white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole (BH). While the existence of some of these classes of objects was known for a long time, the presence of stellar-mass BHs in GCs has only been revealed in the last decade. With the fact that BH-BH binaries are common in the local universe, as indicated by the detection of gravitational waves from the merging events of BH-BH binaries, there are broad scientific implications of the presence of stellar-mass BHs in globular clusters. Through our MAVERIC survey, we have acquired deep radio continuum images of a significant number of Milky Way GCs. I have carried out a detailed study of radio variability along with a multi-wavelength (optical and X-ray) examination of compact objects in some of these GCs to uncover the true nature of primary accreters. In this talk, I will discuss the existence of a mixed population of compact objects in these clusters with at least a few new BH candidates in one of the GCs. Furthermore, I will talk about the study I initiated to examine whether a substantial population of compact objects in the globular clusters are potential sources of fast radio bursts.