The second in our Great Balls of FIRE series, where we (me, Mike Grudić, Zach Hafen, and Astrid Lamberts study the formation and evolution of globular clusters in a realistic MHD galaxy simulation. This is the second paper in a … Continued

Thrilled to announce that Tomás Cabrera, a second year in our group, received an honorable mention for the 2022 GRFP! PI Carl Rodriguez also received a Sloan fellowship for 2022.

After several years of work that started before I was an assistant prof, we have the first public release of the Cluster Monte Carlo code, CMC. The paper is available here while the code itself is available here. CMC is … Continued

Thrilled to say that our team has been awarded a NASA Astrophysics Theory Program (ATP) Grant (21-ATP21-0144) for the 2021 cycle! Split between CMU (PI: Rodriguez, Co-I: Trac) and Northwestern University (Co-Is: Fragione, Rasio), the 4 year, ~$750K grant is … Continued

Are you a scientist with a bunch of Zotero entries that have 1000+ authors (*cough* the LIGO Scientific Collaboration *cough*)? Is your bibtex file huge, and does the Sync with Zotero option break whenever you try to load a bibtext … Continued

In a new research note, we argue that it is now possible to explain the ENTIRE rate of merging binary black holes (BBHs) detected by LIGO with globular clusters. After the first detection (GW150914), the rate of BBH mergers that … Continued

Since I published my paper on spin orientations last year (Rodriguez et al., 2016 or my last post), I think I’ve managed to convince some people that the positive (or negative) values for the effective spins of merging black hole … Continued

It’s been an interesting few years since the first detection of gravitational waves.  We’ve gone from a single, initial binary black hole mergers (GW150914), to 6 detentions (5 binary black holes and 1 binary neutron star merger).  As you an … Continued

So it’s about time that I actually published something here, and this seems as good a topic as any.  As most of you probably know, LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, reported the detection of gravitational waves a couple … Continued