Gravity Initiative

Sam is a theorist working in gravitational physics and relativistic astrophysics.  He is particularly interested in the regime where gravity and/or electromagnetism are strong (dominating the dynamics), which hosts interesting theoretical questions and abundant astronomical mysteries.  (He believes the two are related!)  How do pulsars work?  How can we observe black holes?  In general, his goals are to better understand the laws of nature at strong field, and to explain or predict the behavior of strong-field objects. 

Vasilis' research spans a range of topics in gravitational physics and theoretical astrophysics. The ultimate goal of his work is to understand strong field gravitation and solve long-standing astrophysical puzzles such as the nature of the progenitors of short gamma-ray bursts, the origin of X-shaped radio galaxies, the nature of the equation of state at and above the nuclear saturation densities, and the way through which planets may form around isolated pulsars, to name a few. He is interested in studying compact objects as multimessenger sources, i.e., as sources of gravitational wave, electromagnetic and neutrino signals. For this reason, compact object binaries, such as black hole-black hole (BHBH), neutron star-neutron star (NSNS), black hole-neutron star (BHNS) , and white dwarf-neutron star (WDNS) systems are a major theme of his research.