Gravity and Astrophysics at UMiss

ESA has recently published a call for White Papers describing science themes for the next large ESA missions L2 and L3 to be launched in 2028 and 2034. The White Paper The Gravitational Universe, supporting the case for a spaceborne low-frequency gravitational wave observatory to be launched in 2028, was submitted on May 24 and it is now available on the arXiv. You can join the ranks of Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne and many others who support the eLISA science case here.

Davide was just awarded a prestigious Newton Fellowship from Cambridge University (UK). Congratulations!

Congratulations to Laleh Sadeghian from Washington University in Saint Louis (but currently at the University of Florida), who won the Blue Apple Award at the 7th Gulf Coast Gravity Meeting with the talk “Dark matter distributions around massive black holes: A fully general relativistic approach”.

You can find Laleh’s talk (as well as the other talks) here.

Thanks to all participants, and see you soon at the next GCGM!

The 7th Gulf Coast Gravity Meeting started this morning in a somewhat unseasonably chilly Oxford. A (much needed) warm welcome to all participants!

Today (4/9/2013) Davide Gerosa has successfully defended his Laurea thesis “Black hole spin alignment in astrophysical environments” at the University of Milan (Italy) with a final grade of 110/110 e lode (full marks with honors). The thesis - supervised jointly by Professors Giuseppe Lodato (Milan) and Emanuele Berti (Ole Miss) - is available here, and it is based on work published in these two papers. Davide will soon move to Cambridge (UK) to work on his Ph.D. with Ulrich Sperhake, who is also an Adjunct Professor at Ole Miss. Great job Davide!