About Me

Education: MS in Astrophysics and Cosmology at the University of Padova; BS in Physics at the University of Camerino

Research Interests: Formation channels of intermediate-mass black holes in massive star clusters; evolution of star clusters; impact of star cluster dynamics on binary star evolution

Publications: A list of my publications can be found here

Research

Formation channels of intermediate-mass black holes in massive star clusters
In my master thesis I explored the main formation channels of intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) in massive star clusters, i.e. runaway collisions in the first evolutionary stages of the cluster and hierarchical black hole mergers after its relaxation, using the N-body code PETAR. A link to this work can be found here.

Efficiency of runaway collisions in young globular clusters
In this project (Mestichelli+, in prep) we have studied the efficiency of runaway collisions in star clusters in the first 20 Myr of their lives as a function of their central density, using the N-body code PETAR. The results of this project were presented in a poster at the "Two in a million" workshop (ESO - Garching).

Binary-black hole mergers in Population III populated star clusters
Work in progress!

Community

Outreach: I partecipated to SHARPER (European Researchers' Night) in September 2023, focusing in particular on the discussion of general relativity and gravitational waves.

Contact

Email: benedetta.mestichelli@gssi.it

Address: Viale Francesco Crispi,7 - L'Aquila, Italy