Congratulations to Michele Scalco on his paper 'First observational evidence of a relation between globular clusters’ internal rotation and stellar masses' accepted for publication on Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters.
Michele is a visiting graduate student from the University of Ferrara and the University of Padova (Italy) working at IU with Enrico Vesperini.
Previous theoretical studies of the dynamics of rotating star clusters (including a recent paper by IU graduate student Alex Livernois) predicted that clusters should develop a dependence of their internal rotation on the mass of stars (with more massive stars rotating more rapidly around the cluster's centre).
Michele used data from the Gaia mission to study the internal rotation of three Galactic globular clusters and in two of these clusters (NGC 104 and NGC 5904) (M 5) found clear evidence of the predicted cluster rotation–mass relation. Michele's study is the first to provide observational evidence of this trend.
IU graduate student Alex Livernois, Enrico Vesperini, and collaborators from the Space Telescope Science Institute (Mattia Libralato and Andrea Bellini) and the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica, Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova (Luigi R. Bedin) are coauthors of this paper.
The paper can be found at
https://academic.oup.com/mnrasl/article/522/1/L61/7086132
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