Strong Gravity News & Events

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From astrophysics to high-energy physics, from information theory to quantum gravity, black holes have acquired an ever increasing role in fundamental physics, and are now part of the terminology of many important branches of observational, theoretical and mathematical physics. This workshop aims at bringing together experts about black holes in all their aspects. The fourth edition of the Black Holes Workshop will be held at the University of Aveiro in 18-19 December 2014.

Abstract: With the numerous pieces of evidence for the close evolution of super-massive black holes (SMBHs) and their host galaxies throughout the cosmic history, there has been a great effort to understand what drives such fact. One key point which could help achieve that goal is to observe the very first SMBHs in the early Universe and explore the initial conditions and what sets such co-evolution. This talk will guide you through the observational perspectives of this cosmic dance between SMBHs and their hosts, and the some alternative strategies to study them.

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Abstract: In this talk, we introduce the field of General Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamics (GRMHD) and give an overview on recent effort toward simulating and visualizing astrophysically realistic gas dynamics around compact binaries. In particular we motivate our group's approach, where a post-Newtonian expansion is used to construct an analytic spacetime, and we show preliminary results of circumbinary disks surrounding an equal-mass non-spinning black hole binary.