The IST Students Association (AEIST) has restarted the edition of its journal Técnica. The first issue of this journal appeared in 1925 and it was published regularly until 1998, when it was discontinued. Now, the AEIST has decided it was time to restart its publication, see here for the new edition. There are several articles in this issue. One article is by José Sande Lemos, a CENTRA member, on the works of Mira Fernandes, a mathematician and mathematical physicist, who taught at IST since its foundation in 1911.

CENTRA researchers Ilídio Lopes and Jordi Casanellas have used the oscillations of nearby stars to put limits to the characteristics of the dark matter  particles, the elusive constituents of more than 80% of the total mass of the Universe. These results, to be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, show the potential of the present asteroseismic missions Kepler and CoRoT to investigate the nature of dark matter.

In recent years, the field of alternative theories of gravity has been very active. The plethora of proposed modified theories, the challenge in conceiving new experiments, and the corresponding difficulty of probing unexplored regimes where new physics might be revealed, call for a joint effort within the community.

The workshop Strong Gravity beyond GR: from theory to observations will be held at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) in Lisbon, from 5-8 March 2013. It will bring together leading experts in the area in a highly interactive workshop, with thorough presentations and plenty of time for discussion.

The NRHEP white paper edited by V. Cardoso, L. Gualtieri, C. Herdeiro and U. Sperhake was published as a Focus paper in Classical and Quantum Gravity. This paper was a written summary of the discussions and presentations that took place in the Numerical Relativity and High Energy Physics Workshop

Supermassive black holes can be used to measure the mass of extremely light particles to unprecedented levels and rule out the existence of new exotic particles, perhaps constraining the nature of dark matter. These are the results of a recent study by Vitor Cardoso and Paolo Pani to be published in the prestigious Physical Review Letters and covered by New Scientist, Expresso, Phys.Org. and selected for highlights of the American Physical Society.

The Fundação Oriente and the Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa are organizing a cicle of conferences "CICLO DIÁLOGOS E EXPECTATIVAS" constituted by five dialogs between ten experts in different fields. One of the dialogs will be "Origem e evolução do universo: andando com o relógio para trás, e mais física formidável" by Jorge Dias de Deus and José Sande Lemos, on May 24, 6pm. There will be an atribution of two ECTS (European Credit Transfer System) to the students that attend more than four sessions. For further details, check the official webpage.

This year the Spanish Relativity Meeting will be held in Portugal, in the wonderful city of Guimarães, which is also the 2012 European Culture Capital. For further details, check the official webpage.

A new study by CENTRA members was published in the prestigious Physical Review Letters. The study, led by Prof. Cardoso, shows that orbiting compact stars around black holes can raise tides, or rather "tsunamis" on the surface of black holes, leading to important astrophysical consequences.

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.

A paper by Jorge Rocha on black hole solutions has been selected as a Classical and Quantum Gravity Highlights 2010-2011. These articles comprise a handful of the best research published in the journal in the last year.

The existence of spacetime singularities in Einstein's theory of General Relativity has long troubled physicists. Now, a new theory of gravitation is able to reproduce all the classical tests of relativity, while avoiding singularities such as the Big Bang or those inside black holes. These results, co-authored by Paolo Pani, Vitor Cardoso and Térence Delsate, are being published by the prestigious Physical Review Letters.

CENTRA's Site is beeing migrated from Zope/Plone to Joomla. Some sections are still under construction, please be patient. The old webpage is still available here.

CENTRA is a research unit of Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), created in 1994, with one branch, CENTRA/Algarve, at the University of Algarve and another one at the University of Beira Interior.