Lectures on Gravitational Waves

This and next week I will be giving a series of lectures on "Gravitational Waves" at the Escola de Astrofísica e Gravitação (EAG8) at IST (Lisbon) and at the international school Invisible16 at SISSA (Trieste), respectively. The lectures at SISSA will be also recorded.

Some material related to the lectures (references, problems and notebooks) can be found here (this is still work in progress, since I am still preparing the problems and the Mathematica notebooks...)

The poster of EAG8

The poster of Invisible16

Second detection of gravitational waves from a binary coalescence

Breaking news are all around the globe after yesterday's press conference by the LIGO/Virgo collaboration, which announced a second very solid gravitational-wave event on Boxing Day, Dec 26 2015, dubbed GW151226.

The waveforms of the 3 events detected by LIGO during O1 (the first observation run). GW150914 and GW151226 are events which are very solidly detected (at more than 5 sigma), whereas LVT151012 has a (small) probability of being a statistical fluctuation. From this page. The inspiral phase of the new event GW151226 lasted much longer than the original GW150914 (about 80 cycles in total)

I warmly suggest you to check this beautiful multimedia page, made by Marc Favata and his group.

As the LIGO/Virgo collaboration put it, the era of gravitational-wave astrophysics is officially started!

V Black Holes Workshop in Lisbon

Five years ago, Portuguese scientists working in black hole physics started gathering right before Xmas time in a short and informal workshop. The first edition of the Black Hole Workshop was held in Porto and was a sort of reunion of people working worldwide and coming back home for holidays.

Visit the webpage of the V Black Holes Workshop

Over the years, the workshop extended to nonPortuguese people (I started attending it since the second edition) and it developed to what is now a regular international workshop. This year, we in CENTRA have the pleasure to host the fifth edition, which will be held in Lisbon next Monday and Tuesday. We'll have over 60 participants, about 30 talks and a social dinner at the delicious Restaurante dos Passarinhos!

PS:

If you are wondering what the workshop logo is, it's an artistic view (courtesy of Ana Sousa) based on a very typical decoration in Rossio's square, downtown Lisbon.