中国科学院云南天文台特邀学术报告

YNAO Colloquium 2025

第12期

Topic：Nuclear star clusters, supermassive black holes, gravitational waves

Speaker：Professor Rainer Spurzem

Time：Thursday, July 3, 2025, 10:30–12:00 AM

Location：Lecture Theatre, 2nd Floor, Building 7

Language：English

Tencent Meeting ID：845-967-485

Abstract：

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Nuclear and globular star clusters (NSC and GC) are spectacular self-gravitating stellar systems in our Galaxy and across the Universe. Most of them harbor a supermassive or intermediate mass central black hole (SMBH). Direct N-body simulations are the most computationally expensive but also the most astrophysically advanced method to simulated GC and NSC evolution, using massively parallel supercomputers with GPU acceleration. Stars passing near the SMBH produce a tidal disruption event (TDE), where the light curve of the TDE and the fraction of gaseous debris accreted to the SMBH depend on the orbital parameters before disruption. Our simulations provide rates of different types of TDE events as well as information about extreme mass ratio inspirals and direct captures. It is expected that during the next years thousands of new TDE events will be observed by new instruments, so it is important to provide a background of computer models.

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Speaker：

Prof. Rainer Spurzem earned his PhD from the University of Göttingen in 1988. He then held postdoctoral positions at the University of Würzburg and University of Edinburgh. From 1990-1996, he was a research associate at the University of Kiel. He then moved to the University of Heidelberg and obtained an extracurricular professorship in 2003. Since 2009, he is leading the Silk Road Project as a visiting Professor at the National Astronomical Observatory, CAS and an adjunct Professor at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Peking University. His primary research interests include stellar dynamics, star clusters, black holes, galactic nuclei, gravitational waves, high-performance supercomputing and parallel programming.