Pedro Cunha presented his M.Sc thesis on September 21st 2015, on the topic of "Black Hole Shadows". A student at the University of Coimbra, Pedro chose to do his M.Sc. thesis within Gr@v. His impressive work led him to be awarded a 20 (out of 20) for his thesis, the first ever in the Master programme he attended, and to write an original paper on "Shadows of Kerr black holes with scalar hair".
To celebrate the centenial of General Relativity and simulataneously celebrate five years of the Gravitation Group at the University of Aveiro (Gr@v), established in the Fall 2010, Gr@v will organize a two days event, on 25-26 November 2015. This event will also mark the closing of the "Numerical Relativity and High Energy Physics" Marie Curie IRSES action, an international partnership which was coordinated by our group that ran over the period 2012-2015. Finally, the event will also be integrated in the IDPASC doctoral programme.
For General Relativity's (GR) centennial, Scientific American examined a year’s worth of the GR literature. The study includes all papers (2435) uploaded to the gr-qc arXiv in 2014. Gr@v's paper Kerr black holes with scalar hair appears as the second most cited paper, by other authors, since publication through the middle of 2015.
The proceedings of the seventh edition of the Black Holes Workshop (VIIBHW), held at the University of Aveiro in 18-19 December 2014, have now been published as the August 2015 special issue of the International Journal of Modern Physics D (Volume 24, Number 09, August 2015), including 25 contributed articles and a preface by the editors.
Gr@v team at the 14th Marcel Grossmann Meeting, in Rome: (from left to right) M. Wang, H. Rúnarsson, J. C. Degollado (former member), E. Radu, C. Herdeiro, M. Sampaio and J. Rosa, where we have presented ten talks on the various group's research lines.
Under Rome's July hot sun, this workshop could be described modifying Edison's quote: "Science can really be 99% perspiration..."
Abstract: There is considerable interest in the strong-field behavior of Lorentz-violating gravity theories. One point of interest is whether or not the notion of a black hole as an absolute causal boundary persists in these theories, which can sometimes propagate signals infinitely fast. Past work on spherically-symmetric black holes reveal that absolute causal boundaries exist in spite of these infinitely-fast propagating modes. These causal boundaries have come to be known as universal horizons. In this talk, I shall discuss black holes in two popular Lorentz-violating theories, Hořava gravity and Einstein-aether theory, and showcase progress made in exploring their rotating black holes. For Hořava gravity, I shall discuss three-dimensional black holes in its infrared sector. Within this setting, we have derived the most general class of stationary, circularly symmetric, asymptotically anti–de Sitter black hole solutions. I also discuss slowly-rotating black holes in four-dimensional Einstein-aether theory, which we construct numerically. Most notably, we learn from these solutions that universal horizons may not be a generic feature of black holes in Lorentz-violating theories.
Our group coordinated the "Numerical Relativity and High Energy Physics" IRSES network (2012-2015). Here is a list of the global network meetings organized: