There are at least 100 billion brown dwarfs and planetary-mass objects in our Galaxy - objects that are not orbiting a star and have masses between that of Jupiter and of the lowest mass stars (~80 MJup). Several theories for their formation have been proposed, and could all as well be at work, but their relative importance is not known and is expected to vary with mass and environment.
15 years after the first edition of the Black Holes Workshop that took place at the Faculty of Sciences of Porto University, the XVI Black Holes Workshop returned to Porto, this time in the Faculty of Engineering. The next edition will take place at the University of Aveiro on 19-20 December 2024.
An article on the parameter inference from gravitational wave signals using a novel methodology based on the Newman-Penrose scalar was published this month (December 2023) in Physical Review X. The article is co-authored by Gr@v members C. Herdeiro and E. Radu. PRX has similar quality standards as Physical Review Letters but for longer papers. It has an impact factor of 12.5 (2022).
A call for a 7-month research grant in Strong Gravity for M.Sc. holders, within the research grantGravitational waves and black holes as ultralight dark matter particle detectors, CERN/FIS-PAR/0024/2021, is open from December 7th to 21st, 2023. See attached document for details or the Euraxess announcementhere.
Proca stars, first discovered in this paper, are a vector cousin of the well known model of scalar boson stars - see these papers for reviews [1], [2] and comparisons between the two models [3], [4].
During the week of 13-17 November 2023 we had the pleasure to host Rodrigo Vicente from IFAE, U. Barcelona and Roman Pasechnik from the U. Lund to tell us about their latest research. Of course, discussions are better over a nice lunch!
Our group coordinated the "Numerical Relativity and High Energy Physics" IRSES network (2012-2015). Here is a list of the global network meetings organized:
