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 to study the dynamical evolution of nuclear star clusters, the largest and densest stellar clusters … Continue reading NASA Grant to Support Our Group

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 file into Overleaf (with an unhelpful error message)? Then you should update your library to … Continue reading How to reduce the number of authors in your Zotero library

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 binaries could be a good way to discriminate whether the system was formed from stellar … Continue reading Post-Newtonian Stellar Dynamics

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 imagine, this has been pretty damned exciting. But we still haven't settled exactly where these … Continue reading Black Hole Spins

I'm keeping a list of posts about work I've been doing, either my own papers or papers I've worked on with other people. For now, this is blank, but I intend to do retroactive posts on the papers I've worked on in the past.