This Aspen Winter Conference will bring together
theorists and observers to exchange recent results and prepare for the era of
JWST. We are planning for an in-person meeting. Please see the Aspen Center
for Physics' COVID-19 policy statement for information
about protocols related to COVID-19, including testing, masking, and
cancellation.
Motivation
Globular clusters in the local Universe are common, bright tracers of galactic
halos. Their progenitors were plausibly the first gravitationally bound
baryonic systems to form in the Universe and may represent the dominant mode
of star formation at early times. The ancestors of globular cluster are widely
expected to be visible in deep James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images,
providing insight into the earliest stages of star formation at high redshift
(a key science goal of JWST). Since they are thought to form in high-pressure
environments during epochs of intense star formation and are dense enough to
resist tidal disruption over the age of the Universe, globular clusters link
the small-scale physics of star formation with the large-scale physics of
galaxy formation, and the properties of the early Universe with the present
day. There is much work to be done to understand exactly how they formed and
the connection of that process to the collapse of early dark matter
haloes. Vigorous effort is underway to explore the formation of globular
clusters within cosmological simulations, with attendant predictions for JWST,
in addition to other observatories. In parallel, dynamical modeling of both
systems of globular clusters and internal motions for individual clusters has
been galvanized by transformational Gaia astrometric data. The long-standing
question of the dark-matter content of globular clusters is under new
investigation. Further, ongoing imaging and spectroscopic surveys are
improving quantification of the fossil record held in the properties of
globular clusters in the local Universe.
Science Organizing Committee:
Mike Boylan-Kolchin (The University of Texas at Austin)
Jean Brodie (Swinburne University)
Ray Carlberg (University of Toronto)
Søren Larsen (Radboud University)
Rosie Wyse (Johns Hopkins University; SOC chair)
Massimo Stiavelli (Space Telescope Science Institute; consultant)