Popular conceptions of a research laboratory involve test tubes, large instruments, and busy scientists in lab coats performing experiments.
But at the Gravity Group laboratory housed by the National Institute of Physics (NIP), the most sophisticated equipment next to numerous computers is a communal microwave. Most of the scientific work is done with computers and code or, in many cases, nothing more than a whiteboard, a marker, and an open book.
The Gravity Group is led by Dr. Ian Vega, an Associate Professor at NIP. Gravity primarily explores problems in relativistic astrophysics, where Einstein’s famous theory of general relativity is used to investigate celestial objects like black holes — bodies which have so strong a gravitational force, they can lasso the fastest things in the universe.
Recently, Gravity’s latest publication explored how different models of an expanding universe can be explained in a modified version of Einstein’s theory.
Their other projects focused on ways of extracting energy from black holes, how sun-like bodies orbit objects a million times heavier, and gravitational waves (GWs) — ripples in spacetime caused by violent events such as the merger of massive stars.
Born out of a Balik-PhD grant by UP, Gravity started out small when Dr. Vega returned to the Philippines in 2016 after a PhD and two postdoctoral appointments abroad.
Today, Gravity is a lively group of over 20 researchers engaged in a variety of scientific work. In the future, it hopes to expand its expertise to other research areas such as numerical relativity and astronomy.
Gravity also eyes membership in the LISA collaboration, an international effort to detect GWs more precisely that can help us probe where telescopes cannot and detect the gravitational imprints of the early universe. #
