The ceremony for distinguising the recipients of the 2015 Gulbenkian Prizes for Stimulus of Research, took place on March 9th 2016, at the Gulbenkian Foundation, in Lisbon. Pedro Cunha was awarded one of the prizes for his project on "Black Hole Shadows".
Abstract: The ESO/GRAVITY is an adaptive optics and fringe tracker assisted K-band interferometric spectrograph. The instrument development started in the last decade and reached first fringes with the auxiliary telescopes in December 2015.
The annuncement about the detection of gravitational waves got the attention of Portuguese media, with some contributions from our group:
Interview in Jornal 2, 11th February 2016
On February 11th 2016, the LIGO collaboration announced the first direct detection of gravitational waves. Our group warmly congratulates LIGO for this extraordinary achievement, which opens up access to a new layer of the physical reality!
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation has awarded one of the 2015 prizes for stimulating research to Gr@v Ph.D. student Pedro Cunha, distinguishing his work/project on black hole shadows. Congratulations Pedro!
Pedro Cunha did his undergraduate in Physics and M.Sc in Astrophysics, both at the University of Coimbra. His M.Sc. thesis was already done within Gr@v under the supervision of C. Herdeiro. Pedro is pursuing his Ph.D. studies at the University of Aveiro and IST-Lisbon.
The V global meeting of the Numerical Relativity and High Energy Physics Marie Curie IRSES action, took place in Universidade Federal do Pará, Belém, Brazil, from 28 September -2 October 2015.
Thank you Luis Carlos Crispino for the stimulating meeting in the beautiful Amazonia.
Living Reviews in Relativity has been one of the most prestigous journals in the field of Gravitation. After interrupting its activity in September 2014, it was recently acquired by Springer and has now resumed publication with the new review articles: "Exploring New Physics Frontiers Through Numerical Relativity" co-authored by our group.
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Pedro Cunha presented his M.Sc thesis on September 21st 2015, on the topic of "Black Hole Shadows". A student at the University of Coimbra, Pedro chose to do his M.Sc. thesis within Gr@v. His impressive work led him to be awarded a 20 (out of 20) for his thesis, the first ever in the Master programme he attended, and to write an original paper on "Shadows of Kerr black holes with scalar hair".
To celebrate the centenial of General Relativity and simulataneously celebrate five years of the Gravitation Group at the University of Aveiro (Gr@v), established in the Fall 2010, Gr@v will organize a two days event, on 25-26 November 2015. This event will also mark the closing of the "Numerical Relativity and High Energy Physics" Marie Curie IRSES action, an international partnership which was coordinated by our group that ran over the period 2012-2015. Finally, the event will also be integrated in the IDPASC doctoral programme.