Prof. Kyle Kremer (UC San Diego)

It is now widely established that globular clusters host robust populations of white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes throughout their lifetimes. Within clusters, dynamical processes enabled by stellar densities thousands to millions of times larger than typical galactic environments facilitate interactions involving these stellar remnants that power an array of astrophysical transients. In particular, stellar clusters have emerged as an important formation site for merging black hole binaries, similar to those recently detected as gravitational wave sources by the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA collaboration. In this talk, I will review our current understanding of stellar remnants in globular clusters, discussing current observational evidence and the ways stellar remnants influence the dynamical evolution of their hosts. I will describe the formation of merging binaries detectable as gravitational wave sources and connect to a number of other sources observed in clusters including black hole+star binaries, tidal disruption events, radio pulsars, and fast radio bursts. In the coming years/decades, globular clusters promise to be a nexus for transient astrophysics, connecting to current/next-generation gravitational wave facilities, all-sky surveys like the Rubin Observatory, and state-of-the-art radio telescopes.