Astrophysics News & Events

Can a black hole be different from the Kerr paradigm depending on its spin? In paper to publishd in Physical Review Letters, Gr@v members C. Herdeiro and E. Radu, in collaboration with H. Silva and N. Yunes (U. Illinois at Urbana-Champaigne, US) and T. Sotirou (U. Nottingham, UK), show that the phenomenon of spontaneous scalarisation can lead to non-Kerr black holes, only if they spin fast enough.

The 2020 FCT call for Scientific Research & Technological Development projects had 5847 applications, of which 3317 were considered eligible and 312 recommended for funding. In the Physical Sciences panel there were 139 applications; Gr@v's project, led by C.Herdeiro, a synergy between the different expertise of the group (strong gravity, astrophysics and high energy physics) was ranked first. 

Pedro Cunha was one of the 7 selected researchers for a junior grant, nationwide, within 76 applicants in the Physical Sciences panel, in the third individual call for scientific employment stimulus, promoted by FCT. Pedro (re)joined our group as a post-doc in October 2020, after being a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck institute for gravitational physics in Golm, Germany. Congratulations Pedro!

Four new research students have joined Gr@v this fall: Jenzhi Yang, Ivo Sengo, Vasileios Vatellis and João Pino. Welcome!

Nicolas Sanchis-Gual, the only member of the LIGO-Virgo-Kagra collaboration working in Portugal, officially joined Gr@v and our research unit CIDMA. After his Ph.D. from the University of Valencia, Nico worked as a postdoctoral researcher at CENTRA-IST. He is an expert on Numerical Relativity and Gravitational Waves from dynamical binaries. Welcome Nico!

Watch here a talk on the 2020 Nobel Physics Prize given by C. Herdeiro at the invitation of the Centre for Theoretical and Computational Physics of the University of Lisbon.

C. Herdeiro delivered an invited 5 lectures mini-course for Beijing Normal University on "Asymptotically flat black holes with hair in D=4", from October 13 to 27. The host was Professor Hongbao Zhang.