Astrophysics News & Events

The European Einstein Toolkit Meeting 2023 will be held at the University of Aveiro, hosted by our group, from 19–23 June 2023. More info on the event website.

The paper "Exotic compact objects and the fate of the light ring instability" has been selected as Editor's suggestion in Physical Review Letters (published February 7th 2023) and was also featured in Physics Magazine, an online publication from the American Physical Society (APS) that reports on papers in the Physical Review Journals.

Gravitational waves carry unique information about the compact objects that generate them and the underlying gravitational theory describing them, which has allowed us to test General Relativity and the nature of black holes with unprecedented precision. In addition, they can also bear precious information about the astrophysical environments where binaries coalesce.

Analytical predictions of the gravitational waveform (amplitude and phasing) are key ingredients for building the templates used in gravitational detectors.

The NewFunFiCO Staff Exchange network had its kick off meeting on January 19th 2023. The meeting was virtual, but it promised very interesting real work and synergies to come in the next four years!

Asymmetric binaries provide a unique phenomenology within the family-tree of coalescing systems, which makes them golden targets for future gravitational wave interferometers. Assembled by a compact object orbiting around a more massive body, they can emit gravitational waves from the milliHz to the Hz regime, depending on the size of their components.

New horizon-scale images of the Galactic Center black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) recently published by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) allow for new strong-field tests of the Kerr metric in a previously unexplored regime. I will discuss the recent EHT observations of Sgr A* with a particular focus on how these new results can be used to test fundamental physics.

Resonances are ubiquitous in nature. In this talk, I will focus on resonances due to the interaction of two black holes orbiting a central massive black hole. Such tidal resonances will generically occur for Extreme Mass Ratio Inspirals (EMRIs), if nearby compact objects exist.

The XV Black Holes Workshop took place at ISCTE in Lisbon, with a record number of participants and communications (group photo attached). The next edition will take place in Porto, at the Faculty of Engineering, in the 19-20 December 2023.

The last five sessions of the Gr@v group seminars are now on YouTube in our dedicated channel https://www.youtube.com/@Gravchannel. These include the talks from Guilherme Raposo (University of Aveiro), Roberto Emparan (ICREA and Univeristy of Barcelona), Daniela Doneva (University of Tubingen), Andrew Coates (Koc University) and Renate Loll (Radboud University).

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