Dr. Bhavana Bhat

Galactic Globular clusters (GCs) are ancient stellar systems driven by their internal dynamical evolution. Their internal processes and the interaction with the external tidal field of the host galaxy shape their present-day dynamical properties and their stellar content. It is quite challenging to disentangle the link between their individual cluster properties and dynamical history from today’s observations. During this seminar, I present the results from the survey of Monte Carlo simulations representative of the Milky Way GC population, aimed at exploring the role of different initial conditions on dynamical evolution of star clusters. I will demonstrate the effectiveness of newly introduced empirical diagnostics to describe the dynamical evolutionary phase of star clusters. In particular, the potentiality of these new diagnostics to be able to disentangle clusters hosting a low-mass intermediate-mass black hole of a few hundred solar masses, from cases with large concentrations of dark remnants in their centers will be illustrated.