Cosmology News & Events

The XV Black Holes Workshop will take place at ISCTE, University Institute of Lisbon, on 19-20 December 2022. Registration opens on September 19th.

A new staff exchange network - NewFunFiCO - was chosen for funding within the Horizon-MSCA-2021-SE-01 call. The network has nodes at Aveiro University (Portugal, coordinator), University of Valencia (Spain), Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitaet Frankfurt Am Main (Germany), Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (Mexico), Universidade Federal do Pará (Brazil) and the Chinese University of Hong Kong (China). The network will start on January 1st 2023 and have a lifetime of 4 years.

Our group is co-organizing the VIII Amazonian Workshop on Gravity and Analogue Models, to be held in Belém, Brazil, from 21-25 November 2022. This meeting is also promoted by the FunFiCO network, for which U. Federal do Pará, in Belém, is one of the nodes, coordinated by Prof. Luis Carlos Crispino.

The detection of gravitational waves has been one of the most exciting scientific developments of the XXIst century. These detections are theory-driven, they rely on the existence of waveform libraries, which have been constructed for binary black holes and neutron stars. Gr@v members have collaborated on the construction of the first waveform catalogue for exotic compact objects, an effort led by former Gr@v member Nicolas Sanchis Gual (now at the U. Valencia).

In the 5th FCT individual contest for stimulous of research, Miguel Zilhão, Guilherme Raposo and Hector Olivares obtained 6 years research positions to join Gr@v.

In the paper "The fate of the light-ring instability" Gr@v members P. Cunha, C. Herdeiro and E. Radu, together with former member, currently at the U. Valencia, N. Sanchis-Gual, have unveiled the mystery of the fate of a large class of horizonless ultracompact objects, that could be potential black hole foils.

A long standing intriguing possibility is if the astrophysical black hole candidates could be some other kind of mysterious objects but without event horizons, the defining property of black holes.

The project "Gravitational waves, black holes, and fundamental physics" led by M. Zilhão (co-PI C.Herdeiro), fully based at Aveiro U., was one of the six Scientific Research and Technological Development Projects selected for funding in the 2022 FCT Call for R&D projects in the Physics panel. All results can be seen here.

C. Herdeiro was the invited speaker for the Research Center of Gravitation at Lanzhou University, China, webinar on 27/7/2022.

Gr@v is one of the 126 groups/institutions that joined the European Consortium for Astroparticle Theory (EuCAPT). EuCAPT purpose is to bring together theoretical cosmologists and astroparticle physicists across Europe aiming at increasing the exchange of ideas, coordinate scientific activities, help in the attraction of adequate resources as well as promoting a stimulating, fair and open environment in which young scientists can thrive. Gr@v's participation is coordinated by A. Morais.

Group member Felipe Freitas embraced a new career at Électricité de France (EDF), at the bureau based on Brighton UK. Felipe's expertise on machine/deep learning will now be applied to other problems. Felipe will remain a collaborator of the group still developing some of our current research directions. See you soon Felipe!