In Catania: Camelot

The conference dinner is just beginning.

At INFN: Gravastars (poster by A. Marunovic)

I advise everyone to check out this work, postered by Anja Marunovic:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.3537

How many of you are familiar with gravastars, as alternative to black holes?

M. Punturo: Overview of Gravitational Wave Detectors

Impressive and funny talk about the state-of-art of the gravitational wave detectors. We learnt that, among many background sources, human beings are very noisy! The review was funny and useful for a theoretical-oriented audience.

The fate of neutron stars couples

About half of neutrons stars live in couple, the other half are single. A good news for single neutron stars which are desperately seeking for a partner is that they might find one at any time, especially if they live in a globular cluster. However, most of neutron stars couples are born together, maybe not a the same time, but their parents were already close friends.

Neutron stars couples live happy and spend most of their time dancing together. They never rest, never stop, although everything should have an end...

For pure neutron star couples, for which both partners are neutron stars, the end of their love story is a gigantic event! They are so in love and they are merging both together, making a big firework for a few seconds, emitting huge gravitational waves that humans being try to record on Earth, and disappearing as a single black hole forever...

A short romantic story freely inspired by the talk of talk of F. Pannarale on "The dynamics of compact binary inspirals and mergers".

In Catania: Caffè del Duomo

Late nights out in Piazza Duomo.

David Alvarez-Castillo: Crust-core transition

He will close the first afternoon session.

But... still the slides are missing: "You're crazy" the chairman (D. Blaschke) said. Ok, he has USB key. He is speaking now, let us listen to him! :)

In Catania: One word description of the restaurant where you ate last night.

All from different conference attendees:

Fishy. Expensive. Pretentious. Marvelous. Pizzeria.
Make-yourself. Nice. Delicious. Amazing. Italian. Pizza. Delayed.
Cheap. Empty. Arancino. Eatable. Hotel. Delizioso. Mensa. Nearby.
Good. Fresh. Cozy. Al Dente. Vkusno. Memorable.