Strong Gravity News & Events

Gr@v warmly congratulates the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration for the first direct image of a black hole. This discovery has had a worldwide impact, including news coverage in Portugal with the contribution of Gr@v and former Gr@v members.

In a recent paper "Spontaneous scalarisation of charged black holes: coupling dependence and dynamical features", [arXiv:1902.05079], by Gr@v members A. Pombo and E. Radu, in collaboration with a group at IST-Lisbon (P. Fernandes, C. Herdeiro and N. Sanchis-Gual), fully non-linear evolutions of the process of spontaneous scalarisation of charged black holes.

Gr@v member Valério Ribeiro was part of an international team of researchers studying thermonuclear eruptions in the Andromeda galaxy. The team published, in Nature magazine, the discovery of a super-nova remnant which is bigger than most supernova remnants. They found that the super-nova remnant was the consequence of yearly repeated eruptions over millions of years. Few of these systems are known in the galaxy due to the fact that we suffer from dust obscuration.

Gr@v member João Rosa was one of the recipients of the 2018 Alberto prize, awarded by the Portuguese Society of Relativity and Gravitation (SPRG). The prize was given for his work on the phenomenon of superradiance and its physical and astrophysical implications. The prize was shared by Richard Brito, a researcher of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, in Berlin, Germany. The prize was delivered at the General Assembly of the SPRG, on 19th December 2018, during the XI Black Holes Workshop.

Gr@v member Pedro Cunha was one of the invited lecturers of the V Amazonia Workshop on Black Holes and Analogue Models of Gravity, that took place at the Federal University of Pará, in Belém, Brazil, from December 3rd to 7th, 2018. Cunha gave five lectures on "Geodesics and Shadows of Kerr black holes".

The Brazilian Funding Agency, CAPES, presented Carolina Benone's PhD Thesis with an Honorable Mention. This award results from a Brazilian national contest for the PhD theses defended in 2017. Carolina's thesis was supervised by Professor Luis Carlos Crispino from Universidade Federal do Pará (UFPA), Brazil, and includes research performed with Gr@v members, as a result of two long term visits of Carolina's to Gr@v during her PhD.  Hearty congratulations Carolina!

From October 2018 onwards, Carlos Herdeiro, one of Gr@v's founding members, became an Associate Professor at the Physics Department of IST-Lisbon. The photo shows group members and Yves Brihaye, visiting from Mons University, enjoying a wonderful "parrilhada de peixe", by the seaside, a few kilometers from the Aveiro Campus, on September 28th 2018.

Professor Kunihito Uzawa from Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan, visited Gr@v in the last week of September 2018 and gave a seminar on "No-Go theorems for ekpyrosis from ten-dimensional supergravity". (In the photo with Eugen Radu.)

Gr@v members Pedro Cunha and Carlos Herdeiro were two of the speakers of the Workshop "Dynamics in Strong Gravity" that took place at the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto, Japan, 1-14 September 2018.