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SUMMARY:Black holes and revelations: unseen companions in stellar binaries
  - Kareem El-Badry\, Assistant Professor of Astronomy at the California In
 stitute of Technology
DTSTART:20260312T160000Z
DTEND:20260312T170000Z
UID:TALK244690@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Ruby Ng
DESCRIPTION:The Milky Way contains of order 100 million stellar-mass black
  holes. Yet\, fewer than 100 black hole candidates are known in the Milky 
 Way\, and only about 25 are dynamically confirmed. Our view of the black h
 ole population has been shaped almost entirely by observations of X-ray bi
 naries and gravitational wave sources\, both of which represent rare outco
 mes of binary evolution. I will discuss recent efforts to uncover the much
  larger population of Galactic black holes in non-interacting binaries\, f
 ocusing particularly on astrometry from the Gaia mission. Compared to prev
 ious surveys\, Gaia is revealing post-interaction binaries in wider orbits
 \, whose properties are difficult to explain with standard binary evolutio
 n models. I will discuss how the Gaia catalogs can be leveraged for statis
 tical inference\, despite their complex selection function\, and how they 
 can discriminate between competing formation models.
LOCATION:Hoyle Lecture Theatre\, IoA (tea at 3:30 pm)
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