Activities
Group meetings and journal clubs.
Group meetings and journal clubs.
Papers, proceedings, and more.
Visiting friends.
The group work on various scientific subjects related to gravitational astrophysics, including compact objects, accretion physics, relativistic astrophysics, binary black holes, and gravitational waves.
Pulsars are lighthouses in the sky (Illustration Credit: J. Hester et al./NASA/HST/CXC/ASU)
Rotating neutron stars are observed on the Earth as pulsars if their radiation beams come across our line of sight. Incredibly, these systems provide extreme environments, that are not accessible in laboratories, to study all four fundamental interactions of the Nature: electromagnetic force, strong force, weak force, and gravitational force.
A compact object is accreting materials from its companion star (Illustration Credit: ESO/L. Calçada/M.Kornmesser)
Compact objects, like neutron stars and black holes, accrete greedily the materials from their companion stars. This process creates various interesting phenomena for astrophysics. Various lights from accretion disks provide us important clues to understand the physics behind.
A compact object is accreting materials from its companion star (Illustration Credit: ESO/L. Calçada/M.Kornmesser)
Compact objects, like neutron stars and black holes, accrete greedily the materials from their companion stars. This process creates various interesting phenomena for astrophysics. Various lights from accretion disks provide us important clues to understand the physics behind.
Binary black holes (Illustration Credit: LIGO)
Stellar-mass binary black holes, with masses tens of Solar masses, are a class of primary targets for ground-based gravitational-wave interferometer detectors (like LIGO, Virgo, etc). Massive binary black holes, with masses tens of millions of Solar masses, are to be discovered with high confidence when space-based gravitational-wave interferometer detectors (like LISA, etc) are operating. Supermassive black holes, with masses billions of Solar masses, are being hunted by pulsar timing arrays around the global. To understand the evolution and dynamics of these binary black holes is a central topic in modern astronomy.
LIGO detects gravitational waves from merging black holes (Illustration Credit: LIGO, NSF, Aurore Simonnet/Sonoma State U.)
Gravitational waves were predicted by Albert Einstein more than 100 years ago. The first direct observation of gravitational waves was made by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory in 2015. It opens a new window to look into the dark Universe, impacting significantly the fields of astronomy, physics, and cosmology.
