The group's research on strong gravity involves finding analytical and numerical solutions of Einstein's theory of general relativity, and many of its extensions, either in vacuum or coupled to various types of matter. For our latest developments/activities in this area, please see the listing at the end of this article.
The prime examples of (relativistic) strong gravitational systems are Black Holes. They are truly unifying objects of all physics. The understanding of their formation and dynamics requires the laws of all four fundamental forces, and their physics is relevant not only for astrophysics and cosmology but for a variety of topics within high energy physics.
See here a movie made by the COST action `Black holes in a violent universe', in which our group participates, for a visual overview of different types of black holes.
Nico Sanchis-Gual and Nuno Santos visited Gr@v. Nico gave a seminar on "Non-linear dynamics of spinning bosonic stars: formation and stability". Nuno, an IST graduate, will join Gr@v as a PhD student in 2020, having been the top ranked candidate in the 2019 Individual FCT grant call in the Physics panel.
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.
Spherical boson and Proca stars have been extensively studied in the non-linear regime, but no numerical simulations of rotating bosonic stars have been performed.
Professor Marcus Werner from Kyoto University visited Gr@v and presented a seminar on Optical Geometry and Constructive Gravity, on September 30th 2019.
Gravitational lensing provides an important probe of the background geometry.
In this talk, I discuss light propagation on non-Lorentzian backgrounds which
arise in two different contexts. Firstly, we consider optical geometry, which
is a formalism in 3-space for light propagation in Lorentzian spacetimes: