Gravity and astrophysics at UMiss

The first Observing Run of Advanced LIGO started on Sept. 18. Read more about Avanced LIGO and the contributions of the UM LIGO Team on Ole Miss news: http://news.olemiss. … irst-data-collection.

Today our article Slowly rotating anisotropic neutron stars in general relativity and scalar-tensor theory (Class. Quantum Grav. 32 145008, 2015) is featured in CQG+, the companion website to the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.

Emanuele Berti is one of the PIs of a proposal to the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE) Action, funded by the Horizon 2020 program of the European Union (H2020-MSCA-RISE-2015). This international network will allow us to exchange students and researchers between 8 different universities. Besides Mississippi (PI: Emanuele Berti), the network nodes include Cambridge (PI: Ulrich Sperhake) in the UK; Lisbon (PI: Vitor Cardoso) and Aveiro (PI: Carlos Herdeiro) in Portugal; Paris CNRS (PI: Enrico Barausse) in France; Rome “Sapienza” (PI: Leonardo Gualtieri) in Italy; Perimeter Institute (PI: Luis Lehner) in Canada; and Osaka (PI: Akihiro Ishibashi) in Japan. The RISE action will focus on problems in Strong Gravity and High-Energy Physics.

LISA Pathfinder, ESA’s technology demonstration mission that will pave the way for future gravitational-wave observatories in space, is being shipped to the launch site in Kourou, French Guiana. Exciting times! More info on LISA Pathfinder can be found here and here. The current issue of Physics Today has a very nice overview of present and future experimental efforts to detect gravitational waves.

Update [9/4/2015]: the BBC has a nice article with updates on the status of eLISA and LISA Pathfinder.