Student Posters Repository

More than 80% of the stars in the Universe form in very crowded environments called star clusters. Such systems may contain a number of stars which ranges from few hundreds to few millions, and their size is of the order of 1pc (3.086E13 m). In such dense and crowded environments, dynamical interactions and collisions between stars may trigger a plethora of interesting events, many of which are still being studied and matter of debate. In my research, I simulate such systems using parallel computing, and in particular I exploit GPUs, which are perfectly suited to simulate the gravitational interactions of such systems since they can efficiently parallelize all the Newtonian forces computations that each particle exerts on each other particle. Many complex algorithms and numerical tricks such as regularization and block-timestep are needed to perform such simulations. Furthermore, I need to simultaneously simulate all the needed astrophysical processes such as single/binary stellar evolution, stellar winds, star collisions, etc. In my last project, I try to understand how dynamics of star clusters may lead to the formation of gravitational wave sources (e.g. binary black holes) similar to the recently detected ones and see how it influences the properties of such systems.