Astrophysics News & Events

The machine learning work by Gr@v member Felipe Freitas for detecting gravitational waves was awarded a prize of US $4000 in QHack 2021, being ranked in the top 20 amongst over 300 submitted projects.

A recent paper co-authored by Gr@v in Physical Review Letters, interpreting GW190521 as a collision of bosonic stars (rather than black holes) was covered in the 17 February 2021 BBC Science Focus issue on dark stars.

Gr@v members co-author a paper in Physical Review Letters suggesting GW190521 may be a hint of a new dark matter particle.

The paper "Stationary black holes and light rings", by P. Cunha and C. Herdeiro, published in 2020 in Physical Review Letters as Editor's Suggestion, has been placed in the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric.

The December 2020 issue of the Aveiro University magazine "Linhas UA" includes a feature article covering work at Gr@v and the mysteries of black holes. Check this issue here.

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.