In the framework of the COST action MW-Gaia, related with the Gaia (ESA) mission, for which Gr@v member Sonia Anton serves as MC member, a 3-days workshop on "Astrometry and gravitation - A dynamical view of the sky" is being organised on 4-6 December 2019, at the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, Mont Gros site, Nice, France. More info here.
I present a review on combined numerical and analytical efforts to construct "geon"-type solutions of the Einstein equations. Geons are time periodic - hence non-radiating - and spatially localized objects.
Spherical boson and Proca stars have been extensively studied in the non-linear regime, but no numerical simulations of rotating bosonic stars have been performed.
Professor Marcus Werner from Kyoto University visited Gr@v and presented a seminar on Optical Geometry and Constructive Gravity, on September 30th 2019.
The XII Black Holes Workshop, an annual series of meetings organised by the Portuguese strong gravity community since 2008, will take place in Guimarães, on December 19-20, 2019. More information here.
A long standing problem in General Relativity has been the dynamical properties of spinning bosonic stars. In the paper "Non-linear dynamics of spinning bosonic stars: formation and stability", to appear in Physical Review Letters, the dynamical behaviour of these objects has been unveiled.
The Kavli-RISE Summer School on Gravitational Waves took place at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology, University of Cambridge, on September 23-27, 2019. C. Herdeiro was one of the invited Lecturers.
Pedro Fernandes, a student that graduated from IST-Lisbon, after doing his Master thesis under the supervision of C. Herdeiro and E. Radu on "Spontaneous Scalarization of Charged Black Holes" is moving to Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, where he obtained a scholarship for pursuing his Ph.D. studies. Congratulations Pedro!
Gravitational lensing provides an important probe of the background geometry.
In this talk, I discuss light propagation on non-Lorentzian backgrounds which
arise in two different contexts. Firstly, we consider optical geometry, which
is a formalism in 3-space for light propagation in Lorentzian spacetimes:
Pedro Cunha defended his PhD thesis with title "Shadows and gravitational lensing of Black Holes interacting with fundamental fields" on September 9th 2019, at IST-Lisbon. The panel, composed by Prof. Volker Perlick, Frederic Vincent, José Natário, Carlos Herdeiro (advisor) and José Lemos (president) unanimously attributed the highest classification of Approved with Distinction and Honour to an outstanding piece of work. Congratulations Pedro!