Mike's Astronomy Page

Hi, I'm a graduate student in Astronomy at the University of Maryland Astronomy Department My interests and previous/current research focus on the dynamics of groups of stars under gravity and other relevant forces. I am currently working on my thesis, mainly with Cole Miller, but also with Derek Richardson and Michele Trenti, who is at the University of Colorado. Click below to learn about about:

My Thesis Project - Using PKDGRAV, a tree code, to explore resonant relaxation in more detail than has been previously done and to use this knowledge to better confine the rate of stellar-mass black hole inspirals into the SMBH at the center of a typical galaxy.
My work previous to that - We used NBODY6, a sophisticaed N-body code to show that the degree of mass segregation observed in a star cluster can be used to suggest the presence (or absence) of a large central black hole. This has since spawned several observational papers that apply this method to Galactic globular clusters.
My 2nd-year project - We used HNDrag, an N-body code written by Kevin Rauch and Doug Hamilton here at UMD to simulate sequences of encounters between a binary system consisting of a stellar-mass black hole and another stellar-mass star or remnant and a randomly chosen incoming object. These sequences of encounters allowed us to explore the evolution of such a binary during its liftime in the cluster and comment on the likely rate of high-luminosity xray production due to the roche-lobe overflow of the companion or due to the tidal disruption of an incoming object.

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