The article "Stimulated axion decay in superradiant clouds around astrophysical black holes" (arXiv:1709.06581), co-authored by Gr@v member João Rosa and Tom Kephart (Vanderbilt University, USA), has been accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters and will be highlighted as one of the PRL Editors' Suggestions (a distinction attributed to about one in six Letters).
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.
One well known problem of the standard cosmological constant model is the tension between the high level of clustering observed in the CMB and the one obtained from large-scale structures. This may be an indication that the way dark energy affects clustering might differ from a simple cosmological constant.
"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.
Greybody factors are frequency dependent quantities that measure the deviation from the perfect black body spectrum of Hawking radiation, and they provide us with valuable information about the near horizon structure of black holes. In
addition, when black holes are perturbed the geometry of spacetime undergoes dumbed oscillations.
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.
The first global meeting of the COST Action ”CA 16104 Gravitational waves, black holes and fundamental physics (GWverse)” took place in Malta, Gravity@Malta2018 (22-25 January 2018). The meeting brought together three normally disjoint communities, namely Gravitational Wave detection and analysis, BH modeling (in both astrophysical and GR contexts), and strong-gravity tests of fundamental physics.
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.
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").
