Brief Update: this spring the Rodriguez group will be moving to the University of North Carolina -- Chapel Hill. This website will be largely shut down in favor of dynamics.unc.edu. We're sad to be leaving Carnegie Mellon, where we’ve been fortunate to work with some wonderful colleagues (faculty and students) over the past 2 years. … Continue reading CMU -> UNC
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A Nice Write-up on the Outreach and Diversity TA in CMU Physics
Here's a story on the CMU Webpage about the Outreach and Diversity TA that we've been proto-typing in the physics department for the past two years. The TA (funded as part of my startup at CMU) serves on both the Outreach and DEI committees in CMU physics, and works ~20 hours a week on the … Continue reading A Nice Write-up on the Outreach and Diversity TA in CMU Physics
Great Balls of FIRE
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 https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.16547. This is the second paper in a series. The first paper in the series (https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.05732) identified all the clusters that formed … Continue reading Great Balls of FIRE
Couple of early 2022 Awards to our Group
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.
The Cluster Monte Carlo (CMC) Code
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 a Monte Carlo technique for stellar dynamics, based on an aproach developed by Hénon in … Continue reading The Cluster Monte Carlo (CMC) Code
NASA Grant to Support Our Group
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
How to reduce the number of authors in your Zotero library
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
The Observed Rate of Binary Black Hole Merger can be Entirely Explained by Globular Clusters
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 LIGO predicted was more than 200/Gpc^3/yr. Almost every formation channel predicted merger rates of around … Continue reading The Observed Rate of Binary Black Hole Merger can be Entirely Explained by Globular Clusters
Post-Newtonian Stellar Dynamics
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
Black Hole Spins
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
Black Hole Dynamics 