Globular Clusters and Their Tidal Tails: From the Milky Way to the Local Group

About the conference

Gravitationally-bound star clusters are the extreme modes of star formation, and they are ubiquitous amongst galaxies and cosmic time. Their formation and evolution is inherently a multi-physics and multi-scale problem, involving star formation and feedback, galaxy formation and evolution, collisional relaxation-driven N-body dynamics, stellar and binary evolution. The conference will cover a wide variety of topics related to star clusters (among others):

1. their formation from giant molecular clouds,
2. the impact of the stellar feedback from their massive stars onto the interstellar medium,
3. the populations of exotic stellar objects as sources of gravitational waves,
4. their dynamical evolution within their host galaxy,
5. the formation of tidal tails,
6. their role as tracers of the process of galaxy assembly.

The avalanche of data from a multitude of observatories and satellites, such as Gaia and APOGEE in the Milky Way, and JWST in highly-lensed high-redshift galaxies, is shifting our perspective of star clusters. We hope to build on this trend by further connecting researchers across those areas, both locally in the Great Lakes area and internationally. One of the main goals of this meeting is to foster new collaborations, and thus we will allocate ample time for panel discussions, small group interactions and technical workshops on new techniques. We expect there might be funding available to provide partial travel funds for early career researchers, and there is no registration fee for this meeting.

Abstract submission is now closed.

The workshop will take place in the Department of Statistics of the University of Toronto (700 University Avenue, Toronto), and it is supported by the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics and by the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics.

Program

The exact schedule will be posted soon. Oral contributions are expected to be 20min (15+5) to allow for plenty of discussion. The expected schedule is 9am to 5pm, with talks before lunch and workshops, discussions and summaries in the afternoon.

Contact

For further information, feel free to contact either the SOC co-chairs:

Marta Reina-Campos (reinacampos at cita.utoronto.ca) and Josh Speagle (j.speagle at utoronto.ca);

or the LOC co-chairs:

Steffani Grondin (steffani.grondin at utoronto.ca) and Josh Speagle.