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.
Axions can play very important roles in cosmology. They are interesting candidates for dark matter, dark energy, inflation but also, in the case of the QCD axion, a natural solution to the strong CP problem.
In a recent paper "Spontaneous scalarisation of charged black holes: coupling dependence and dynamical features", [arXiv:1902.05079], by Gr@v members A. Pombo and E. Radu, in collaboration with a group at IST-Lisbon (P. Fernandes, C. Herdeiro and N. Sanchis-Gual), fully non-linear evolutions of the process of spontaneous scalarisation of charged black holes.
Gr@v member Valério Ribeiro was part of an international team of researchers studying thermonuclear eruptions in the Andromeda galaxy. The team published, in Nature magazine, the discovery of a super-nova remnant which is bigger than most supernova remnants. They found that the super-nova remnant was the consequence of yearly repeated eruptions over millions of years. Few of these systems are known in the galaxy due to the fact that we suffer from dust obscuration.
João Rosa was interviewed for Porto Canal's "Mentes que brilham" about his work on stimulated axion decay around primordial black holes as a possible origin for fast radio bursts, recently published in Physical Review Letters. He also gave a related interview to the radio programme "Click" on Antena 1.
Watch the presentation movie of the COST Action CA16104 Gravitational waves, black holes and fundamental physics (GWverse), in which Gr@v is involved as part of the core group.
The movie was created at the University of Aveiro (Portugal), written and directed by Carlos Herdeiro, with Design and Graphics by Joana Reis and Ana Sousa and Edited by Pedro Henriques.
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 invited review article "Shadows and strong gravitational lensing: a brief review", by Gr@v members P. Cunha and C. Herdeiro was selected as Editor's choice in General Relativity and Gravitation.