Recent News
The Renaissance of Stellar Black-Hole Detections in The Local Group
Dr. Mark Kennedy of School of Physics, UCC attended a workshop in the Lorentz Centre, June 2023.
Researchers met at the Lorentz Centre in Leiden, The Netherlands, to discuss the recent discovery of several dormant black holes within our Galaxy and the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. These systems have challenged our understanding of black hole formation and binary evolution, and provided a unique test bed for probing general relativity in the region of stellar mass black holes. Dr. Mark Kennedy attended this invite-only workshop, and shared his expertise on using binary modelling codes to measure the masses of the black holes in these fascinating systems. He also led a discussion on how many of these types of black holes we can expect to find in wide field optical surveys and, alongside the other participants, created a living catalogue of dormant black holes, which can be found here: https://mkenne15.github.io/BHCAT/index.html
The image above was from a boat trip social outing as part of the workshop.