Last week I wrote a short paper on an idea recently put forth by Farrah et al., that claimed that black holes may be the source of dark energy. The idea is basically the following: if black holes are coupled … Continued

Congratulations to Tomás Cabrera on the submission of his first paper as a graduate student (and the first student-lead paper submitted from our group)! Here, Tomás explored the interactions between compact objects (black holes, white dwarfs, and neutron stars) and … Continued

We’re absolutely thrilled to be one of 20 people awarded a Packard Fellowship in the year 2022! These transformational, $875k grants from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, can be instrumental in establishing a new research group, and will hopefully … Continued

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