Globular Clusters: Astronomical Factories of Black Holes, Gravitational Wave Sources, and Other Stellar Exotica

Over the past few years, the groundbreaking detections of gravitational wave signals from merging binary black holes and neutron stars by LIGO/Virgo have opened a new window to the cosmos. One key question regarding these gravitational wave sources concerns the nature of their origin. Dynamical formation in dense stellar environments like globular clusters has emerged as an important formation channel, corroborated by recent numerical simulations and observational indications suggesting that globular clusters contain dynamically significant populations of stellar-mass black holes throughout their lifetimes. In this talk, I will examine ways black hole populations influence the dynamical evolution and observable properties of globular clusters and discuss the dynamical formation of merging black hole binaries that may be detectable by LIGO/Virgo and LISA and various other astronomical sources including tidal disruption events and X-ray binaries.