Strong Gravity News & Events

Etevaldo Costa Filho visited the historic Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen to collaborate with Rodrigo Panosso Macedo. Cold weather but hot physics in Copenhagen!

The NewFunFiCO network co-organized the XV School of the Division of Gravitation and Mathematical Physics of the Mexican physics society, that took place in Cancun, Mexico, in the first week of November 2025. Wonderful talks and scientific discussions in a wonderful venue!

Gr@v PhD student Manuel Mariano is visiting Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, US, for a month. There he presented a seminar entitled “There and back again: outspiralling motion in non-Kerr compact objects”.

When the bosonic sector of the electroweak theory is minimally coupled to General Relativity, magnetic Reissner-Nordström black holes become unstable below a critical horizon size.

Romain Gervalle (Ph.D. U. Tours, France, 2025) and TianXiang Ma (M.Sc, Lanzhou U., China, 2024) have joined our group in October 2025. Ana Bokulic (Ph.D. U. Zagreb, Croatia, 2024), already a group member, also renewed her group membership into 2026. Great to have you in the group!

On Oct. 22nd 2025 we had the visit of João Dinis Álvares, who completed his M.Sc. at IST-Lisbon. João gave an interesting talk on the evolution of scalar fields around black holes and also shared with us that he decided to study physics after an outreach talk by Gr@v members, in Braga, back in 2017. Thank you João, for the kind words and all the best for your Ph.D. abroad!

Dyson, just before the first detection of Gravitational Waves (GWs) by LIGO, raised the question of whether the detection of a single graviton can be achieved with GW strain detectors. If this is possible, then it would be a direct evidence for the quantization of the gravitational field.

Spontaneous scalarization is a mechanism that allows black holes to develop a non-trivial profile of a scalar field “scalar hair” because of tachyonic instabilities, enabling tests of gravity beyond General Relativity.

A Black Hole is Born: 3D GRMHD Simulation of Black Hole Formation from Core-Collaps

Goni Halevi, Swapnil Shankar, Philipp Mösta, Roland Haas, Erik Schnetter