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 University of Aveiro and Gr@v join the many worldwide tributes to the life and work of Stephen Hawking. As a small contribution, the U. Aveiro asked Gr@v member C. Herdeiro to write an article for its online news that can be found here. A video statement can be found here (both in Portuguese).
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.
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.
Gr@v member T. Boekholt visited Tokyo University in Tokyo, Japan. His visit was hosted by Prof. Michiko Fujii, head of the computational astrophysics group at the Astronomy Department. T. Boekholt started a new collaboration on studying planetary dynamics and he presented his recent publication on the Slingshot mechanism in Orion.
Our group coordinated the "Numerical Relativity and High Energy Physics" IRSES network (2012-2015). Here is a list of the global network meetings organized:
