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!
Abstract: We investigate the thermodynamics of spherically symmetric black hole solutions in a four-dimensional Einstein--Yang-Mills-SU(2) theory with a negative cosmological constant. Special attention is paid to configurations with a unit magnetic charge.
Gr@v researchers have found that there are only two equilibrium possibilities for the spin of black hole binaries, and that they are similar to the equilibria observed for the spin of the Moon, which was identified by Giovanni Domenico Cassini in 1693. The results were published this week in MNRAS Letters.
This year's Chilean school on gravitation took place in Concepción, from 4-8 January, focused on black holes and solitons. One of the invited lecturers was Gr@v member C. Herdeiro, delivering a five lectures course on "Asymptotically flat black holes with scalar hair in four spacetime dimensions."
Abstract: Spontaneous scalarization is a scenario in some scalar-tensor theories of gravity where non-perturbative (order-of-unity strength) scalar fields can develop near neutron stars.
Exactly one hundred years after Einstein's completion of the general theory of relativity, Gr@v gathered some collaborators and friends to celebrate Gr@vity!
The cover of the Physical Review Letters Vol. 115, issue 21 (November 20th, 2015), exhibits one of the figures of the Gr@v paper Shadows of Kerr black holes with scalar hair [Pedro V. P. Cunha et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 211102 (2015)] showing the lensing of a boson star with a light ring.
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.