I couldn’t resist posting these two hilarious pictures of Donald Turnip’s visit to the Áras an Uachtaráin in Phoenix Park yesterday to meet the President of Ireland, Catherine Connolly. Her expression in the first picture is priceless, and the second one looks like she sent him away with a flea in his ear.
It seems that Trump said that he “would love to see” a united Ireland, which is quite a surprising statement to come from an Orange Man…
I did a post a few months ago about Space Warps, a new citizen science project on the Zooniverse platform, in which volunters can search to find rare and elusive strong gravitational lenses in never-before-seen images captured by the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope. The project aims at shining a light on dark matter in galaxies and providing clues about the mysterious thing call dark energy.
The Space Warps Euclid project is entering the closing stages, but there is still about a week in which you can help with refining the final sample. Read more about it here:
It’s time once more for another Saturday update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further seven papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 202 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 649. This means that the total in Vol. 9 (2026) has now passed that of Vol. 8 (2025), with more than three months to go.
I continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also contain a clickable form of the DOI for each paper. Our Mastodon account has regular updates and other announcements from OJAp too.
The first paper this week was published on Monday 7th September in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The title is “Not all cores are equal: Phase-space origins of dynamical friction, stalling and buoyancy” and the authors are Shashank Dattathri & Frank C. van den Bosch (Yale U., USA), Uddipan Banik (Princeton U., USA), Martin Weinberg (U. Mass., USA), Priyamvada Natarajan (Yale U., USA), Zhaozhou Li (Nanjing U., China) and Avishai Dekel (The Hebrew U., Israel). The paper describes how the distribution function of a galaxy, not just its central density gradient, influences the efficiency and direction of dynamical friction, affecting the movement of massive objects within it.
The overlay is here:
You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:
The second paper for this week, also published on Monday 7th September, but in the folder Earth and Planetary Astrophysics, is “The Third Option: Color Phase Curves to Characterize the Atmospheres of Temperate Rocky Exoplanets” by Drake Deming (U. Maryland, USA) and 8 others based in the USA, Germany and The Netherlands. This article presents a A spectroscopic survey of the Carousel lens galaxy cluster, identifying 12 lensed sources and 57 unlensed field galaxies. The findings could help constrain cosmological parameters and cluster properties.
The overlay looks like this:
The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
The third paper of the week, also published on Monday 7th September but in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, is “Dependences of radio pulsar parameters on the kick velocity” by Anton D. Lazarev and Sergei B. Popov (Moscow State U., Russia). This study analyzes the velocity kick of neutron stars, finding that 23% belong to the low-velocity mode. Differences in magnetic field distribution emerge, but no significant bimodality in physical parameters.
The overlay is here:
The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
The fourth paper of the week is “A Dusty Quenching-Candidate AGN host at z=5.7: massive quiescent galaxies may quench already during the dust-obscured phase” by Francesco D’Eugenio (U. Cambridge, UK) and 14 others from the UK, Italy, China and The Netherlands. It was published on Wednesday 8th September in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. This article concerns RUBIES-EGS-9809, a dust-reddened galaxy with a dominant point-source component, suggests that AGN feedback may influence its host., indicating that massive galaxies can host evolved stellar populations during their dust-obscured phase.
The overlay is here:
The officially-accepted version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
The fifth paper of the week is “The Carousel Lens I: A Spectroscopic Survey of the Carousel Lens Field” by Jackson H. O’Donnell (U.C. Santa Cruz, USA) and 22 others from around the world. This was published in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies on Thursday 10th September 2026. This paper presents a spectroscopic survey of the Carousel lens galaxy cluster, identifying 12 lensed sources and 57 unlensed field galaxies. The findings could help constrain cosmological parameters and cluster properties.
The overlay for this one looks like this:
The officially-accepted version of this paper is on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement on the fediverse here:
The penultimate, sixth, paper of the week is “No Gravitational Anomaly in Wide Binaries from Forward Modeling of 3D Orbits” by Serat M. Saad and Yuan-Sen Ting (Ohio State U., USA). This was also published on Thursday 10th September, but in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. The study reanalyzes a dataset on gravitational anomalies, finding results consistent with Newtonian gravity, contrary to previous findings that suggested Modified Newtonian Dynamics. The overlay for this one is here:
The officially accepted version is on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:
Last but by no means least we have “The quenching time and timescale distribution of z~2 quiescent galaxies from precise colour distribution analysis” by Vivienne Wild (U. St Andrews, UK), Ho-Hin Leung & Adam Carnal (U. Edinburgh, UK) and Maya Skarbinski (Johns Hopkins U., USA). This paper was published on Thursday 10th September in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It describes a study that uses simulation-based inference to analyze galaxy formation and quenching times, revealing that galaxies must quench rapidly post-Big Bang to achieve a specific color distribution.
The overlay is here:
The final version of this paper is on the arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:
It is worth mentioning that there was one deferred arXiv mailing this week, due to the Labor Day holiday in the USA, so some papers were therefore published a day later than usual.
That concludes this week’s update. I’ll do another next weekend.
As a journal Editor I’ve been grappling with the problem of a huge influx of papers that use various forms of generative AI. As I’ve said before the problem seems to me not that competent scientists use LLMs and the like to speed up their work, but that fools can use them to produce superficially plausible but scientifically flawed articles very quickly. It’s the latter category that comprises much of the increase at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. I’d be far more positive about LLMs if we could rely on people to use them properly!
Anyway, there’s a new paper on the arXiv with the title More than half of recent astronomy papers are written with language-model assistance. Here’s the abstract:
As you can see, the claim is that over half of the recent astronomy papers on the astro-ph section of arXiv use Large Language Model (LLM) assistance but that only a tiny fraction of that number declare it. (In my experience those that declare use of LLMs also understate the extent if their use.)
I think this paper is well worth reading. It is based on the excess frequency of certain words and phrases. The authors explain:
Counting excess vocabulary is straightforward. Converting a count into a statement of the form “% of papers used a language model” requires the frequency these words would have had if language models had never been released, and that frequency stopped being observable in November 2022. Statistical precision is not the obstacle, since with hundreds of thousands of papers the observed frequencies are known almost exactly. That frequency can only be supplied by a model, so every estimate in this literature rests on the model chosen for it.
They go on to analyse various models to arrive at their conclusions. I’ll leave it to the reader to go into the details.
One issue I have is that the analysis seems to assume that all changes after the introduction of LLMs in late 2022 are attributable to LLMs. But language changes anyway, and was changing long before AI came on the scene. I would like to see, as a control, a comparison between, say 2006-2010 and 2011-2015 so see if similar changes happened. One problem is that the total number of papers on arXiv is growing monotonically so there are many more papers in 2025 than there were in 2006.
P.S. Ironically, the analysis behind and the writing of this paper were both “assisted” by Claude….
P.P.S. Here’s a suggestion: if you use an LLM to help you write the paper, then you should name it as a co-author.
Today is 11th September 2026 which means it is exactly 25 years since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon which led to the loss of almost three thousand civilian lives (and many more in the longer term). At the risk of contributing to the deluge of (mainly mawkish) reminiscences about the happenings on this day all that time ago, let me just give a brief account of my recollection. The events of 9/11 are, I suspect, etched on many a memory in much the same way as people remember what they were doing when President Kennedy was assassinated.
For what it’s worth, I was actually at a conference on that day. It was called A New Era in Cosmology, and was hosted in the fine city of Durham; in fact one of the organizers was a certain Tom Shanks, an occasional commenter on this blog. Above you will see part of the conference poster which I took from a recent Facebook post by him where I also found the text below. I was also reminded that 9/11 was the first day of that meeting and that I gave a talk on the first morning, the last before lunch. Such was the effect of the events that unfolded that day that I had completely forgotten about that.
What I do remember is sitting near the back of the lecture theatre after we returned from lunch, listening to one of the afternoon talks – I can’t remember who it was by – when a dear friend of mine, Manuela, came into the auditorium and walked down the aisle, stopped by me. She tugged my arm, mumbled something about the “Twin Towers” and then ran back up the stairs and out of the lecture theatre. Thinking it was something to do with Wembley Stadium, I followed her out and she explained what had happened. We found a TV set, around which a crowd had already formed. The coverage was, not surprisingly, shambolic and it was not until late afternoon that the scale of what had happened became clearer.
There were rumours of more planes likely to be involved in attacks and discussions about whether the military might have to shoot down civilian aircraft. Fortunately that wasn’t the case. I had a friend visiting New York at the time and was unable to contact her by mobile, so was worried, but I don’t think anyone was able to contact anyone in New York by mobile phone in those hours and it turns out she was fine.
Meanwhile the other participants were informed about the events on the other side of the Atlantic. It was an international conference with many US-based attendees who were understandably worried. The preface to the conference proceedings reveals that discussions were held about whether to cancel the meeting:
I think it was the correct decision to proceed with the conference, including the conference dinner and all that. As it happened all passengers flights were grounded for several days anyway, so nobody could get home who didn’t live in the UK.
The rest of the conference was pretty much business as usual as far as possible, although as the text above explains we did stand in silence in memory of the victims on the Tuesday morning. When the meeting ended on the Friday quite a few people had to stay on in Durham or elsewhere before being able to fly home. It was this event that led to the heightened security measures at airports that we have been living with since.
The loss of human life, though awful, turned out to be much less than had been feared and was subsequently dwarfed by the hundreds of thousands killed in the “War on Terror” set in motion by the events of that day and which seems will never end.
Anyway, my point is not the politics but to invite a bit of audience participation. Would anyone else like to contribute their memories from that fateful day? If so, the comment box awaits your entry…
The above picture shows fascist thug and career criminal Daniel Thomas (a.k.a. Danny Tommo) leading a “protest” of uniformed knuckleheads (those on the right of the picture, in short trousers) outside the Daily Mail offices in London.
Fans of P.G. Wodehouse will recall Roderick Spode, the 7th Earl of Sidcup, who leads a fascist group called the “Saviours of Britain” also known as the Black Shorts. He is of course a parody of Oswald Mosley and his group a parody of Mosley’s Black Shirts (aka the British Union of Fascists).
Here’s a relevant quotation from The Code of the Woosters (published in 1938):
The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting “Heil, Spode!” and you imagine it is the Voice of the People.
How prescient was that?
Incidentally, fans of historical trivia might be interested to know that the grandson of Oswald Mosley (founder of the British Union of Fascists) and Diane Mitford (a friend of Adolf Hitler, who married Oswald Mosley at the home of Joseph Goebbels) is Louis Mosley, CEO of Palantir UK.
Coincidentally, Nigel Farage went to the same school as P.G. Wodehouse, Dulwich College.
When I moved to Ireland, almost nine years ago, one of the words I discovered had a usage with which I was unfamiliar was grind. My first encounter with this was after a lecture on vector calculus when a student asked if I knew of anyone who could offer him grinds. I didn’t know what he meant but was sure it wasn’t the meaning that sprang first into my mind so I just said no, I had just arrived in Ireland so didn’t know of anyone. I resisted the temptation to suggest he try finding an appropriate person via Grindr.
I only found out later that grinds are a form of private tuition and they are quite a big industry in Ireland, particularly at secondary school level. School students whose parents can afford it often take grinds in particular subjects to improve their performance on the Leaving Certificate. It seems to be less common for third level students to pay for grinds, but it does happen. More frequently, university students actually offer grinds to local schoolkids as a kind of part-time employment to help them through college.
The word grind can also refer to a private tutor, i.e. you can have a maths grind. It can also be used as a verb, in which sense it means `to instil or teach by persistent repetition’.
This sense of the word grind may be in use in the United Kingdom but I have never come across it before, and it seems to me to be specific to Ireland at least in current usage. A colleague sent me a link to an article about Carew Arthur Meredith, who worked at Trinity College Dublin from 1943 to 1964 but who was previously at Cambridge University and lived there until 1939:
After graduating, Meredith married Sybil Clark and settled down to what was to be for many years his occupation: that of university coach or “grinder.”
This establishes a possible conduit for the transfer of the word “grinder” from England to Ireland and it inspired me to look at the trusty online Oxford English dictionary which includes examples of usage. In fact the OED gives as examples of “grind” as a transitive or intransitive verbs and as a noun as well as the verbal noun “grinding” and the deverbal noun “grinder”. Here are some pertinent quotes. The first below, incidentally, is from a book of American college slang, demonstrating that the word had crossed the Atlantic by 1851.
Here are the most relevant examples, some of them hilariously susceptible to a double entendre.
n. Steady hard work; labour of a monotonous kind, esp. close and hard study; an instance of this, a dull and laborious task.
1851
Grind, an exaction; an oppressive action. Students speak of a very long lesson which they are required to learn, or of anything which is very unpleasant or difficult to perform as a grind.
B. H. Hall, Collection of College Words
1857
A medical student would have told him, that a ‘Grind’ meant the reading up for an examination under the tuition of one who was familiarly termed ‘a Grinder’—a process which Mr. Verdant Green’s friends would phrase as ‘Coaching’ under ‘a Coach’.
‘C. Bede’, Mr. Verdant Green Married xi. 93
vi. To work hard at a subject of study under the direction of a tutor or ‘grinder’.
1835
I am obliged to ‘grind’..that is, undergo a private examination with an authorized teacher or tutor.
E. Forbes in G. Wilson & A. Geikie, Memoir of Edward Forbes (1861) vi. 176
1870
After grinding with private-tutor Mylius the requisite time, Lessing entered the school of Camenz.
J. R. Lowell, Among my Books (1873) 1st Series 308
vt. To teach (a subject) in a steady laborious manner; also, to prepare (a pupil) in a subject.
1815
implied in:
Perhaps when Tom leaves Oxford..we may contrive some gainful grinding [i.e. tutorial] scheme between us. [at grinding n.]
J. Keble, Letter to Coleridge in Mem. (1869) iv. 63
1848
A pack of humbugs, and quacks, that weren’t fit to get their living but by grinding Latin and Greek.
W. M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero lvi. 502
1859
[Dr. Bennett] undertook to grind him in anatomy and physiology.
G. Wilson & A. Geikie, Memoir of Edward Forbes vi. 180
In Hard Times by Charles Dickens there is a character by the name of Mr Thomas Gradgrind, a grimly utilitarain school superintendent who insisted on teaching only facts. Hard Times was published in 1854 which is after some of the quotations above so Dickens did not originate the use of “grind” in teaching. He may have amplified it, of course.
This demonstrates that these terms were established in 19th Century England, but does not explain how their usage died out there but still flourishes in Ireland. Can anyone shed light on this? First recorded usages of grind, etc in Irish literature would be most helpful!
I see that the fascist mob that is nowadays given free rein by the UK police to roam the streets, block traffic, close ports, and generally do whatever they like, has now, at the behest of wannabe Führer Nigel Farage, turned its attention to the brave men and women of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. Volunteers of the RNLI have had their photographs and other personal information circulated in the cesspool that is X/Twitter in an attempt to intimidate them. The reason? For rescuing people in danger of drowning in the English Channel.
Only the lowest of the low would attack these brave and selfless volunteers who risk their own lives saving lives at sea. As a regular donor to the RNLI I have today increased my contribution and will be wearing my RNLI pin badge in support of the brave men and women who regularly risk their lives to save those in distress at sea.
Incidentally, in case you were wondering, the RNLI also serves Ireland: there are 59 lifeboats based in 45 stations in the Republic as well as Northern Ireland. It also over two hundred years old. Here’s a short video celebrating the bicentenary in 2024:
If you wish to donate to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution then you can do so here.
I was feeling a bit grotty this morning and had lost my voice but I managed to summon up the energy to attend today’s Conferring Ceremonies – usually known as Graduation ceremonies in the UK – at Maynooth University. It was a special day for the graduands, their families and friends, of course, but also quite a significant one for me. The cohort of students graduating today included a significant number whom I taught in the first year at Maynooth, four years ago, before I went on sabbatical. I taught some of them again in their third year, after I returned, and some last year. I am no longer teaching first-year students, so this will be the last group that I’ll see from beginning to end of their degrees. It was nice to be at their Conferrings to see them off, and especially nice to chat afterwards and see that so many of them are going to do further study as postgraduates (some here in Maynooth and some elsewhere, including Trinity and UCD). I noticed this morning that the next intake of students has started to register. I don’t yet know how many Physics students I’ll be teaching in two weeks’ time but I do know that I’ll have retired before any of them graduate.
Conferring Ceremonies at Maynooth used to be held in the Aula Maxima, on South Campus, which is an excellent venue with lots of atmosphere. Nowadays however they are held in the far less evocative surroundings of a modern lecture theatre in the TSI Building. I know I’m an old fuddy-duddy but much preferred the previous location. Students don’t even get to sit in the same room as the parents, but march in through one door, cross the front of the hall, collect their parchment, and then march out through another door.
I like graduation ceremonies, actually. As the graduands go across the stage you realize that every one of them has a unique story to tell and a whole universe of possibilities in front of them. How their lives will unfold no-one can tell, but it’s a privilege to be there for one important milestone on their journey. It’s also a bit strange in some cases finally to put a name to a face that I’ve seen around the place regularly, just before they leave the University for good. I always find this a bittersweet occasion. There’s joy and celebration, of course, but tempered by the realization that many of the young people who you’ve seen around long enough to grow accustomed to their faces, will disappear into the big wide world never to be seen again. On the other hand, this year quite a few graduates of the Department of Theoretical Physics are staying in Maynooth to do Masters programmes so they won’t all be vanishing without trace.
Graduation of course isn’t just about dressing up. Nor is it only about recognizing academic achievement. It’s also a rite of passage on the way to adulthood and independence, so the presence of the parents at the ceremony adds another emotional dimension to the goings-on. Although everyone is rightly proud of the achievement – either their own in the case of the graduands or that of others in the case of the guests – there’s also a bit of sadness to go with the goodbyes. It always seems that as a lecturer you are only just getting to know students by the time they graduate, but that’s enough to miss them when they go. All this is a roundabout way of saying congratulations once more to everyone who graduated today, and I wish you all the very best for the future!
With thoughts turning to the new academic year I noticed an Open Letter to Universities in the Netherlands, which I have signed. You can read the letter yourself but here is a summary of the main calls to action:
• Resist the introduction of AI in our own software systems, from Microsoft to OpenAI to Apple. It is not in our interests to let our processes be corrupted and give away our data to be used to train models that are not only useless to us, but also harmful.
• Ban AI use in the classroom for student assignments, in the same way we ban essay mills and other forms of plagiarism. Students must be protected from de-skilling and allowed space and time to perform their assignments themselves.
• Cease normalising the AI hype and the lies which are prevalent in the technology industry’s framing of these technologies. The technologies do not have the advertised capacities and their adoption puts students and academics at risk of violating ethical, legal, scholarly, and scientific standards of reliability, sustainability, and safety.
• Fortify our academic freedom as university staff to enforce these principles and standards in our classrooms and our research as well as on the computer systems we are obliged to use as part of our work. We as academics have the right to our own spaces.
• Sustain critical thinking on AI and promote critical engagement with technology on a firm academic footing. Scholarly discussion must be free from the conflicts of interest caused by industry funding, and reasoned resistance must always be an option.
I agree with all of these. I don’t think The Management does though.
In Maynooth University there has been a total absence of leadership from the Management about the academic threats posed by the uncritical adoption of “AI” . I’ve put “AI” in quotes because most of what is being described as AI nowadays (e.g. LLMs) is not is in no way Artifical Intelligence. There is a place for such things as Machine Learning. Indeed, much of the data-driven research in my own field of cosmology would be impossible without them. The key, however, is not whether you insist on calling it AI or not, but the word uncritical. Much of what I have heard from our “Leadership” is simple-minded boosterism. And yes, that word is in quotes for the same reason as “AI”.
In planning my teaching for next term, which starts in two weeks, I have taken a hard line on assignments. I allow no assignment to contribute to a module grade unless it is supervised in such a way as to prevent “AI” being used. Both modules I will be teaching next semester are mathematical in nature, and the summative assessments will consist of four (unseen) in-class tests and a written exam. Phones, laptops and tablets are banned from all these.
I believe that this is the only way to maintain the integrity of these assessments and that to do anything else will result in a lowering of academic standards. I believe this is the case across a great many disciplines, so there should be university-wide regulations to manage it. I find the absence of any “Leadership” on this scandalous (but I’m afraid not surprising).
This is not to say that I will band the use of LLMs etc entirely. Students will be free to use ChatGPT or CoPilot or whatever to check their answers to the formative assessments I hand out, if they think that will help, but these will not contribute to their module mark.
In the Dark 