In the framework of the COST action MW-Gaia, related with the Gaia (ESA) mission, for which Gr@v member Sonia Anton serves as MC member, a 3-days workshop on "Astrometry and gravitation - A dynamical view of the sky" is being organised on 4-6 December 2019, at the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, Mont Gros site, Nice, France. More info here.
The Kavli-RISE Summer School on Gravitational Waves took place at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology, University of Cambridge, on September 23-27, 2019. C. Herdeiro was one of the invited Lecturers.
Pedro Cunha defended his PhD thesis with title "Shadows and gravitational lensing of Black Holes interacting with fundamental fields" on September 9th 2019, at IST-Lisbon. The panel, composed by Prof. Volker Perlick, Frederic Vincent, José Natário, Carlos Herdeiro (advisor) and José Lemos (president) unanimously attributed the highest classification of Approved with Distinction and Honour to an outstanding piece of work. Congratulations Pedro!
Gr@v Ph.D. students Alexandre Pombo, João Oliveira and Jorge Delgado visited Belém, Brazil as members of the FunFiCO Marie Curie RISE project. Their visit coincided with the VII Amazonian Workshop on Gravity and analogue models, where they presented their work, and the Amazonian High Studies School in Theoretical Physics where they attended courses on Numerical Relativity and Gravitational Lensing.
Current and former Gr@v members met at the 22nd International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation (GR22) in Valencia, Spain. Great talks and great discussions!
The paper "Spontaneously Scalarized Kerr Black Holes in Extended Scalar-Tensor–Gauss-Bonnet Gravity" published in Physical Review Letters (PRL), authored by Gr@v members Pedro Cunha and Eugen Radu (co-authored by Carlos Herdeiro from IST-Lisbon), was selected to feature on the cover of the 3rd July 2019 issue of PRL.
In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, Gr@v researchers Pedro Cunha and Eugen Radu (in collaboration with Carlos Herdeiro from IST-Lisbon) provide a new insight on how spin could mask non-GR features in astrophysical black holes.
On May 29th 1919 Eddington and Cottingham measured the position of stars near the sun during a total eclipse observed at the island of Príncipe, off the west African coast. Their results, together with the ones of another expedition undertaken by Crommelin and Davidson to Sobral (Brazil), were announced on November 6th 1919 and confirmed the General Theory of Relativity. This openned a new era in our understanding of gravity, space, time and matter... and made Einstein world famous.
In this talk I describe a new class of superradiant instabilities in which ultralight scalar fields extract rotational energy from neutron stars. The instability arises from the mixing of scalar and photon modes in the magnetic field of the neutron star which extract energy from the rotating magnetosphere.
Gr@v warmly congratulates the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration for the first direct image of a black hole. This discovery has had a worldwide impact, including news coverage in Portugal with the contribution of Gr@v and former Gr@v members.