On the week of March 2nd to 6th, the Black Hole Group attended the IAU Symposium 359: Galaxy Evolution and Feedback Across Different Environments, or simply the GALFEED symposium. The event occurred at the beautiful setting of Bento Gonçalves in the south of Brasil. This is the wine region of the country, which specializes in the merlot variety.
This was an incredible event which led to many fruitful interactions between the group members and the galaxy evolution community. Beginning on March 2nd, Fabio and Raniere gave poster flash talks where they had the daunting challenge of summarizing their posters in only one minute. Not so easy, but they did a great job!
Queue of students waiting to present their work 
Fabio Cafardo presenting his PhD work on Sgr A* 
Raniere de Menezes presenting his work on low-luminosity AGNs
On Tuesday, it was Ivan and Gustavo’s turn to face the one-minute-present-all-your-research challenge. And again, it went fantastic!
Gustavo Soares talking about blazars and their spins 
Ivan Almeida presenting his numerical simulations of black hole winds at low Eddington ratios
On Wednesday, we surprised Fabio with a surprise birthday party: it was his 40th birthday! There was cake and presents!
On Thursday, it was Rodrigo’s turn. He surprised the audience by beginning hist talk about spin estimates for M87*…
… and then switching gears to talk about the first AI simulation of a black hole—the work of graduate student Roberta Pereira.
The first quarter of 2020 was very bright and productive for the group, despite the worrying news with COVID-19 all over the world.
Thanks to the IAU and FAPESP for funding our group’s attendance to this meeting.
Black Hole Group 