Strong Gravity News & Events

The Spanish-Portuguese Relativity Meeting (EREP2021) programme is now online. The event, organized by our group, will start on September 13th 2021.

Zeus Sales Moreira a student from Universidade Federal do Pará, Brazil, successfully defended his M.Sc. thesis entitled “Black hole spacetimes: radiation emission and light rings” on July 29th. The thesis was advised by C. Herdeiro and L. Crispino and the examiners were E. Radu and G. Olmo (U. Valencia). Congratulations Zeus!

Guilherme Raposo (left, Ph.D. from Rome, La Sapienza, 2021) joined our group in a partnership with IST-Lisbon from July 2021. Welcome Guilherme! João Novo (middle) and João Pino (right) were awarded individual FCT PhD scholarships in the 2021 call. Congratulations to both!

We celebrated the end of the 2020/21 academic year with a sunny and delicious group lunch at the seaside. And it was a wonderful year for the group made science!

Yasha Shnir (from Dubna, Russia) and Massimo Vaglio (from Rome, Italy) visited our group in June-July 2021 within the COST action GWVerse, to strengthen the collaboration with different group members, on several aspects of strong gravity. Thank you for your visit!

Gr@v Ph.D. student Jorge Delgado got a best pitch award for his pitch (short talk) in the UA Research Summit 2021, in the session for students of the MAP-Fis Ph.D. programme. Congratulations Jorge!

A call for a 2 years postdoctoral grant in Strong Gravity, within the research grant “Testing the Kerr hypothesis with gravitational waves and lensing", PTDC / FIS-AST / 3041/2020, is open from 1 to 20 August 2021.  See attached document for details (in Portuguese) or the Euraxess announcement (in Portuguese and English) here.

The photon ring is a narrow ring-shaped feature, predicted by General Relativity but not yet observed, that appears on images of sources near a black hole. It is caused by extreme bending of light within a few Schwarzschild radii of the event horizon and provides a direct probe of the unstable bound photon orbits of the Kerr geometry.

Bosonic stars are multipurpose gravitational solitions and dark matter contenders. Yet, as shown in a paper co-authored by Gr@v members. N. Sanchis-Gual, C. Herdeiro and E. Radu published in Physical Review Letters, the known solutions are just the just the tip of the iceberg... and the new configurations unveil a mechanism that provides dynamical stability.