Great Balls of FIRE III: Modeling Black Hole Mergers from Massive Star Clusters in Simulations of Galaxies

Understand

After the nearly hundred gravitational-wave detections reported by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration, the question of the cosmological origin of merging binary black holes (BBHs) remains open.

• The two main formation channels generally considered are from isolated field binaries or via dynamical assembly in dense star clusters.
• Here, we focus on understanding the dynamical formation of merging BBHs within massive clusters in galaxies of different masses.
• To this end, we apply a new framework to consistently model the formation and evolution of massive star clusters in zoom-in cosmological simulations of galaxies.