PUBLIC LECTURE: Globular Clusters

Speaker: Ken Freeman, Duffield Professor and E3 Distinguished Professor, Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, The Australian National University and IAS Professor-at-Large 2009.

Globular clusters are dense nearly spherical clusters of typically 100,000 stars. They are among the first objects to form when our Galaxy was assembled long ago, so they are a very important part of our understanding of what happened in the early universe.

Although these star clusters look simple and robust, they are in fact complex system, in many ways more complicated than the galaxies within which they reside, and they are quite fragile.

In this lecture, Professor Freeman will illustrate how we believe that these clusters are formed, how they can be destroyed, and discuss some of the new puzzles which these clusters are posing.