Media/Press

Published by admin on Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Interview in National Geographic
In March 2014, Emanuele was interviewed in a National Geographic article reporting the measurement of the spin of a supermassive black hole in a lensed quasar at redshift z = 0.658. The original Nature article is here, and the National Geographic article is here.

Interview in Scientific American
In July 2013, Emanuele was interviewed by Scientific American for a story on how the CMB could place constraints on the lifetime of the photon. Read more about it here.

Black hole bombs and photon mass bounds
Our recent Physical Review Letters paper and the companion Physical Review D article were nicely covered by Edwin Smith for Ole Miss News. Our work was featured on the front page of the APS website and selected as an APS Physics Synopsis. The article received media coverage from New Scientist, phys.org, Science Daily, the Physics Today blog, the Portuguese newspaper Expresso and the Italian website Gaia News.

Finally, Emanuele appeared as a guest in this interesting article in Scientific American (and also in Nature), Big Bang Light Reveals Minimum Lifetime of Photons. The original paper discussed in the article (which is related to our work) is here.

The idea is that ultralight bosons with nonzero mass can produce a “black hole bomb” - a strong instability that would extract energy from the black hole very quickly and spin the hole down. However we do observe spinning black holes in the Universe. These observations can be used to set bounds on the mass of hypothetical massive photons. With this technique we constrained the mass of the photon to be about one hundred times smaller than the previously accepted bound.

Resonant shattering of neutron star crusts
Jocelyn Read’s recent Physical Review Letters paper, Resonant Shattering of Neutron Star Crusts (with collaborators from Caltech and Penn State) was selected as an Editor’s Suggestion. It was extensively covered by the press, including a synopsis in Physics (Neutron Stars Shattered by Perfect Pitch), an article in Ars Technica (Neutron stars might shed their skins before colliding) and one in New Scientist (Astrophile: Glimpse elusive matter in shattering star).

Floating and sinking: massive scalar fields and rotating black holes
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!

Poster on recent research
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).

Articles on CAREER Award
The University of Mississippi news website Z!NG has an article on Emanuele Berti’s NSF CAREER Award. See also this article on the newsletter of the College of Liberal Arts (The View from Ventress).

Cosmos magazine
Emanuele comments on a recent Nature article discussed in the online version of Cosmos magazine. New measurements suggest that supermassive black holes may not be so supermassive after all!

Classical and Quantum Gravity Highlights of 2009/2010
The review Quasinormal Modes of Black Holes and Black Branes by Emanuele Berti, Vitor Cardoso and Andrei Starinets was selected as one of the highlights of 2009/2010 by Classical and Quantum Gravity. Check out also the other papers on the journal website

Coming soon: First pictures of a black hole
Results by Emanuele Berti and Marta Volonteri (Michigan) are discussed in a cover story by New Scientist

No naked black holes
Our results on high-energy collisions of black holes, showing that head-on encounters radiate 14% of the center-of mass energy, were covered by Science News

Black Holes Are No Joke
Kip Thorne: Why was the black hole hungry? Stephen Hawking: It had a light breakfast! Black hole humor—you gotta love it…

UM Professor Leads Million-Dollar Laser Exhibit
A University of Mississippi professor will serve as the principal investigator for a $1 million astronomy outreach program that premiered today in New York City…

UM Physicists Involved in Research that Narrows ‘Big Bang’ Theory
A team of University of Mississippi physicists participated in newly reported research that advances understanding of the early evolution of the universe and sets new limits on gravitational waves that could have come from the theorized Big Bang…