Gr@v members Pedro Cunha and Carlos Herdeiro were two of the speakers of the Workshop "Dynamics in Strong Gravity" that took place at the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto, Japan, 1-14 September 2018.

The XI Black Holes Workshop will take place at IST-Lisbon on 17-18 December 2018. The Black Holes Workshops gather researchers working on physical and mathematical problems of black holes, both in its classical and quantum aspects, as well as their connections to general relativity and gravitation, string theory, cosmology, and astrophysics, and stimulate the interaction between all these issues.

The paper "Spontaneous scalarisation of charged black holes", co-authored by Gr@v members C. Herdeiro and E. Radu, together with N. Sanchis-Gual and J. A. Font, from the U. Valencia, was published in September 2018 in Physical Review Letters.

From September 2018 onwards, Alexandre Correia, one of Gr@v's founding members, became an Associate Professor at the Physics Department of Coimbra University. Gr@v warmly congratulates Alexandre on this well deserved promotion. The photo shows a farewell dinner organised in July 2018 with collegues from Aveiro University.

Conventional wisdom says the influential physicist John A. Wheeler coined the term black hole in 1968. But a deeper analysis reveals a much richer story, that starts centuries ago in a British India prision. This fascinating story features in the July 2018 edition of "Gazeta de Física", the newsletter of the Portuguese Physics Society, authored by C. Herdeiro and José S. Lemos (in Portuguese).

Gr@v attained a high success rate in the FCT 2017 Call for "Scientific Research and Technological development project grants" with three funded grants out of the 49 funded grants nationwide within the Physics Evaluation Panel, corresponding to 6% of this funding. The Gr@v members leading the three funded projects are 1) Alexandre Correia (PI); 2) Carlos Herdeiro and Eugen Radu (PI/co-PI); 3) Marco Sampaio and António Morais (PI/co-PI).

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.

The CIDMA Young Doctor Award is a prize for a researcher within 5 years after the PhD, who has made important contributions to his or her research field. The 2018 award is granted to Gr@v member Tjarda Boekholt for his recent achievements in the field of dynamical chaos in astronomical systems. During the annual meeting of CIDMA 2018, Tjarda presented his new numerical N-body code and the ability to obtain reversible solutions to highly chaotic systems.

In a recent paper "Head on collisions of Proca Stars", [arXiv:1806.07779], by N. Sanchis-Gual et al., head-on collisions of exotic compact objects known as "Proca stars" were studied via fully non linear numerical simulations, with the goal of extracting the gravitational wave templates that such exotic objects could produce.

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.