A team of Gr@v members (P. Cunha, J. Delgado, C. Herdeiro and J. Oliveira) is visiting the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, at its Cuernava Campus, in April-May 2018 hosted by Professor Juan Carlos Degollado. The visit occurs within a Marie Curie RISE action, of which both UNAM and Aveiro Universities are partners.
On May 29th, 1919 a joint Royal Astronomical Society and Royal Society expedition led by Arthur Eddington to Principe observed a total solar eclipse, confirming the deflexion of light predicted by the General Theory of Relativity. Eddington at Sundy: 100 years later (E@S) results from a joint initiative of several institutions, including our group, to celebrate the centenary of these observations.
Brown dwarfs are objects that bridge the realms of stars and planets. With masses below ~0.08 MSun, they cannot sustain hydrogen fusion, never reach the main sequence, and remain cooling forever. Star forming regions and young clusters harbour large populations of these substellar objects, including some with masses comparable to those of giant extrasolar planets.
The invited review article "Shadows and strong gravitational lensing: a brief review", by Gr@v members P. Cunha and C. Herdeiro was selected as Editor's choice in General Relativity and Gravitation.
The black hole theorist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking passed away at the age of 76. Stephen Hawking distinguished himself not only as a brilliant scientist, with remarkable contributions such as the discovery of black hole evaporation, but also as an active science communicator with best selling books, most notably A brief history of time.
Recent advances in radio telescopes in sensitivity, response time, and wavelength coverage have opened a wealth of new research opportunities. This is particularly the case for transients, where high sensitivity and rapid response is crucial. I will describe how radio observations of two classes of objects are helping to further our understanding of jet physics.
Eclipse timing variation (ETV) analysis of short period binaries is a useful method to detect circumbinary exoplanets.
The satellite Venus Express (2006-2015), together with the Japanese spacecraft Akatsuki (still in orbit) and ground-based campaigns, are unveiling our neighbor planet. At the same time, those new measurements put in evidence the complexity and the high variability of the Venus atmosphere, opening new scientific questions (e.g.
Quasi-Stellar Objects (QSOs) are active galactic nuclei so powerful, that their luminosity can surpass that of the host galaxy, making the observation of the latter extremely difficult or even impossible. Usually QSOs appear on images as point-like sources, what, together with the enormous distances, makes them excellent objects for the materialization of reference systems.
