My research

Read about my research —–> Ma recherche // french

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MW+GCsSchematic view of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, and its system of ~160 globular clusters orbiting around it. Each globular cluster is made of ~1 million stars that formed at the very beginning of the history of the Universe, about 13 billion years ago. An observation of the largest GC in the Milky Way, Omega Cen, is shown. Just like every globular cluster, its central region is extremely dense and composed of a variety of stars and exotic objects such as black holes and neutron stars. The remarkable properties of globular clusters and the abundance of detailed observations available make them unique laboratories for a number of astrophysical contexts and for the development of innovative data analysis and modelling techniques.

My research focuses on the study of the structure and internal dynamics of quasi-relaxed stellar systems, in particular the formation and evolution of globular clusters, using dynamical modelling, simulations and observations. Currently, I am particularly interested in the exploitation of cutting-edge numerical techniques incluing GPU-parallel simulations using some of the largest supercomputers in France (e.g. Jean-Zay by GENCI), and the development of innovative machine-learning algorithms to augment the extraction of physical information from complex data sets. With this approach, I aim at exploiting globular clusters to explore a series of multidisciplinary questions including:

  1. The properties of the primordial Universe: globular clusters formed 13 billion years ago and survived until today; therefore they can be considered as living fossils of the primordial Universe (the “high-redshift” universe), and can provide crucial information on the properties of the early Universe and on the earliest phases of star formation.
  2. The formation and build-up of galaxies: Since globular clusters live in galaxies, they experienced the tumultuous processes that brought to the formation and build-up of galaxies throughout cosmic time. They can therefore be used to reconstruct the formation history of galaxies and to measure their properties (e.g. the gravitational potential of a galaxy).
  3. The formation of massive black holes: The high density in globular clusters increases the number of gravitational interactions between stars and/or black holes. These repeated interactions (collisionality) can give rise to the formation of binary systems (e.g. two stars or two black holes orbiting close around each other) and to mergers (e.g. two black holes merging together) creating more massive black holes, such as intermediate- mass black holes.
  4. The existence of dark matter on the small scale: Since globular clusters formed in the primordial universe, it has been suggested that they formed in small dark matter halos. However the presence of dark matter in the small scales of GCs has not been unveiled yet, but its detections would have a strong impact for astrophysics, by providing crucial constraints on its very nature.