Astrophysics News & Events

A recent Gr@v co-authored article is ranked #130 in all time media coverage of Phys. Rev. Lett. outputs. Watch here (in English) and here (in Portuguese) video explanations of the work.

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.

Evolution of binary black-hole spacetimes
F. Pretorius
Phys. Rev. Lett. 95 (2005) 121101

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.

Abstract: The bright blazar OJ 287 is the best-known candidate for hosting a supermassive black hole binary (SMBHB) in the present observable universe.