Gravity and Astrophysics at UMiss

The eXtreme Digital Request Allocation Committee (XRAC) recommended an extension of our NSF Grant PHY-090003 (High energy grazing collisions of black holes, PI: Ulrich Sperhake, Co-Is: Emanuele Berti, Vitor Cardoso, Frans Pretorius). This grant will provide us with 2,000,000 core hours from XSEDE (formerly known as TeraGrid) to study black hole collisions.

Our recent paper on floating orbits was published in Physical Review Letters. The INAF website has a nice outreach article on our work. INAF is the Italian Institute of Astrophysics, and the article is in Italian (you have been warned!). Thanks to Marco Galliani for the write-up!

The European Commission Research Executive Agency has approved an International Research Staff Exchange Scheme (IRSES) Marie Curie action on Numerical Relativity and High Energy Physics (NRHEP) within the FP7 People Programme. This action will promote research in gravitational physics, with a focus on applications of numerical relativity to high-energy physics.

The partnership involves research institutions in five countries. It is coordinated by Emanuele Berti (Mississippi, USA), Vitor Cardoso (Lisbon, Portugal), Luis Carlos Crispino (Pará, Brazil), Leonardo Gualtieri (Rome, Italy), Carlos Herdeiro (Aveiro, Portugal; action coordinator) and Ulrich Sperhake (Barcelona, Spain).

About thirty researchers will be exchanged between the six nodes over the four-year duration of the exchange program, that will start in 2012. The action will also support workshops and other events at each of the participating nodes.

The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal featured an article about the Oxford Science Cafe this Sunday: A cosmic perspective: Oxford Science Cafe explores the universe.

The Oxford Science Cafe is organized by Prof. Marco Cavaglià and November’s speaker was Ole Miss postdoc Jocelyn Read.

This poster gives an overview of recent theoretical research on black holes and neutron stars at the University of Mississippi. The poster was prepared on occasion of a visit to Ole Miss by Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker and his staff (11/18/2011).