Newlin

Weatherford

As a CTAC Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Newlin Weatherford uses numerical simulations to study gravitational dynamics in star clusters, especially how escaping stars from these clusters produce elongated substructures in our Galaxy known as stellar streams. Modeling these streams and perturbations to them is essential to understanding the history of our Galaxy and potentially to inferring the nature of dark matter. Weatherford also studies the impact of central black holes on star cluster evolution and methods to detect or infer the presence of black hole populations in observed clusters. This work is relevant to high energy astrophysics, especially the production of compact binaries, transients, and gravitational-wave events.