Mr Tyrone O'Doherty

I am a PhD student and Forrest Scholar at the Curtin University node of ICRAR, and I’m looking for the invisible black holes in our Galaxy. My supervisors are Prof. James Miller-Jones, Dr. Arash Bahramian, and Dr. Adelle Goodwin.

Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the Universe. Stellar-mass black holes are those born from the deaths of the most massive stars in our Galaxy. An unknown fraction of black holes in our Galaxy form in an unknown fraction of binary systems. We typically study black holes by observing the light emitted when they interact with their binary companion, however, non-interacting black holes cause no emission and are invisible to direct observation. My research uses data from state-of-the-art telescopes around the world to probe this population of invisible black holes through their interactions with other stars. Gaining insight into this population will help inform our models of black hole formation rate, stellar lifecycles, and binary evolution theory.