Shokoufeh Faraji is a Postdoc in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Waterloo Center for Astrophysics at the University of Waterloo. She finished her PhD at ZARM Institute at the University of Bremen, Germany. Her research areas include but not limited to the general theory of relativity, accretion discs, and quasi-periodic oscillations with (semi-) analytical methods.
Title: Physics of quadrupolar and astrophysical objects
Abstract: Theoretical and observational efforts are being pursued to understand and test general relativity in many ways. The ideal regime for such surveying involves the strong gravitational fields in the vicinity of the astrophysical black holes and compact objects, which are not directly accessible. Large international collaborations like the Event Horizon Telescope, and LISA, among many others, make access to a wide range of observational data. Mostly, it is assumed that astrophysical black holes are described by Kerr solution. However, besides this setup, others can also imitate a blackhole's properties, making it challenging to decide when one tries to link the models to the observation. The black hole mimickers issue is currently of significant interest in the general relativity and astrophysics communities and has recently become quite popular. Astrophysical observations may not all be well-fitted within the general theory of relativity by employing just a restricted family of Kerr space-time. It appears essential to explore departures due to exercising relatively small parameters that can be taken as the additional physical degrees of freedom to the set-up and facilitate the link to the observational data with analytical and numerical approaches. This talk will present the construction of such an alternative background and be followed up by a recap on the physics and astrophysical properties that one expects to observe, using analytical and numerical methods.