Strong Gravity News & Events

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.

"SKA days PT" took place last 6 and 7 of February, at Covilhã and Lisbon, an initiative to promote the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) - the world's largest radio telescope - among the Portuguese scientific and business communities.

SKA project has the participation of 19 countries, in the case of Portugal it is via the infrastructure ENGAGE SKA, which is a consortium composed by the Instituto de Telecomunicações, the Universities of Aveiro (Gr@v), Porto and Évora, and the Polytechnic Institute of Beja.

DOPPLER (DevelOpment of PaloP knowLEdge in Radioastronomy), coordinated by Dr. Valério Ribeiro of Gr@v (University of Aveiro), is a recently funded FCT and the Aga Khan Development Network project.

A team from Aveiro University composed by Tatiana Costa (Aveiro Research Support Office), Nikolai Sobolev and Carlos Herdeiro (both RISE projects coordinator from the Aveiro Physics Department) was present in the RISE coordinator's day at the head of REA (Research Executive Agency) in Brussels, in 18-19 January 2018. The photo shows the RISE coordinators of the Math/Physics panel with REA staff, including Project Officer Amanda Jane Ozin-Hofsaess and the Head of Unit Fredrik Olsson Hector.

Ema Valente successfully finished her Physics M.Sc. at Aveiro University, on December 20th 2017, by defending a thesis with title "A simple model of exotic compact objects: interaction with a scalar field". This thesis was supervised by Gr@v researcher C. Herdeiro and examined by Prof. Luis Crispino, from the U. Federal do Pará, Brazil. Well done Ema!

The fourth general assembley of the Portuguese Relativity and Gravitation Society (SPRG) ellected the following new officers: C. Herdeiro (president), J. Natário (vice-president), V. Cardoso (Treasurer), J. Lemos (General Assembley President), F. Mena (First Secretary), J. Costa (Second secretary). These officers appear in the above photograph presenting the 2017 Alberto Prize to M. Zilhão. The remaining officer is J. Rocha ("Fiscal Único").

The X Black Holes workshop took place at Aveiro University on 18-19 December 2017. It gathered almost 100 scientists discussing black holes from many different perspectives. Besides 63 oral communications, the workshop also included the fourth General Assembley of the Portuguese Relativity and Gravitation Society (SPRG) and a special session celebrating the 60th anniversary of Prof. J. S. Lemos.