Institute for Advanced Study Informal Astrophysics Seminar

Our traditional interpretative picture of the internal dynamics of globular clusters has been recently revolutionized by a series of discoveries about their chemical, structural, and kinematic properties. The empirical evidence that their velocity space is much more complex than usually expected encourages us to use them as refreshingly novel phase space laboratories for some long-forgotten aspects of collisional gravitational dynamics. Such a realization, coupled with the discovery that the stars in clusters were not all born at once in a single population, makes them new, challenging chemodynamical puzzles. Thanks to the proper motions of thousands of stars that will be available from the Gaia mission, we are about to enter a new ''golden age'' for the study of the dynamics of this class of stellar systems, as the full phase space of several nearby Galactic clusters will be soon unlocked for the first time. In this context, I will present the highlights of a more realistic dynamical paradigm for these intriguing stellar systems, with emphasis on the role of angular momentum, velocity anisotropy, external tidal field, and their non-trivial interplay. Such a fundamental understanding of the emerging phase space complexity of globulars will allow us to address many open questions about their rich dynamical evolution, elusive stellar populations, putative black holes, tantalizing dark matter content, and, ultimately, to formulate a modern view of their role within the history of our Galaxy.