I can’t remember when I was last in the Victoria and Albert Museum but it’s long enough ago for me to have forgotten how big it is. It being free to get in and very near to why I am we are staying it was an easy decision to head there this morning before going to the Pride festivities. In fact it was so enjoyable and so extensive we were a bit late leaving. It’s definitely well worth a visit if you’re in London.
I remember the Raphael Cartoons from when I was last at the V&A. They’re very well done – an example is on the right below – but I didn’t find them very funny. In fact I couldn’t see the joke in any of them!
Just so you don’t think I’m a complete ignoramus, the “cartoons” are complete designs for tapestries – they would be placed underneath the loom as a template for the weavers to follow. Incidentally, the Bayeux “Tapestry” – currently on display in the British Museum – is not a tapestry at all. Being stitched rather than woven, it’s an embroidery not a tapestry. The Raphael cartoons were made for tapestries that hang on the walls in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, intended to complement Michelangelo’s famous ceiling. I still don’t know who did the floor.
I’m not very good at taking pictures in galleries, especially when I’ve got company as I had today, but in the light of yesterday’s post I couldn’t resist this:
It’s a plaster study by Alfred Stevens for a sculpture that would form part of the memorial to the Duke of Wellington in St Paul’s Cathedral. It’s called Truth and Falsehood (there is another called Valour and Cowardice).
In this work Truth tears out the double tongue of Falsehood and pushes aside the mask concealing his grotesque features. His serpent-tails are exposed beneath the drapery.
Another thing I was reminded of by today’s visit is the prominent role played in the early days of the Victoria & Albert Museum in South Kensington by the artist Frederic Leighton, who featured in a recent post.
It’s Saturday again so it’s time for another 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 136 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 584.
I will continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also show the DOI for each paper.
The first paper to report this week, published on Monday 29th June, is “Analysis and implications of the spatio-spectral morphology of the Fermi Bubbles” by Ami Tank (Indian Institute of Technology) and Roland Crocker & Mark R. Krumholz (Australian National University). Published in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, this paper presents an analysis of An analysis of the gamma-ray structures of Fermi Bubbles in the Milky Way using a decade of data. The research suggests either hadronic or leptonic processes can explain the data.
The overlay for this paper is here
You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Analysis and implications of the spatio-spectral morphology of the Fermi Bubbles" by Ami Tank (Indian Institute of Technology) and Roland Crocker & Mark R. Krumholz (Australian National University)
The second paper for this week, also published on Monday 29th June, but in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, is “A first measurement of baryonic feedback with Fast Radio Bursts” by Robert Reischke (Universität Bonn, Germany) and Steffen Hagstotz (Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, Germany). This paper argues that Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) provide a new method to trace baryon distribution and feedback in the cosmos, offering insights into matter distribution and rejecting no-feedback scenarios with high confidence.
The overlay looks like this:
The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "A first measurement of baryonic feedback with Fast Radio Bursts" by Robert Reischke (Universität Bonn, Germany) and Steffen Hagstotz (Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, Germany)
The third paper of the week, published on Tuesday 30th June in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, is “Idealized Global Models of Accretion Disks with Strong Toroidal Magnetic Fields” by Minghao Guo & Eliot Quataert (Princeton U., USA), Jonathan Squire (U. Otago, NZ), Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech, USA) and James M. Stone (Princeton). This study uses global magnetohydrodynamic simulations to explore the behavior of idealized accretion disks with strong toroidal magnetic fields, finding that these systems maintain a moderately strong mean azimuthal field.
The overlay for this one is here:
The final, accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Idealized Global Models of Accretion Disks with Strong Toroidal Magnetic Fields" by Minghao Guo & Eliot Quataert (Princeton U., USA), Jonathan Squire (U. Otago, NZ), Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech, USA) and James M. Stone (Princeton)
The fourth paper of the week, published on Tuesday 30th June in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, is “On the effective spin-mass ratio relation of binary black hole mergers that evolved in isolation” by Sambaran Banerjee (Helmholtz-Instituts für Strahlen und Kernphysik, Germany) and Aleksandra Olejak (MPA Garching, Germany). This study explores mechanisms of binary black hole mergers and finds that certain spin and mass ratio trends can be naturally explained by isolated binary evolution. The overlay for this one is here:
You can read the final version of this one on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "On the effective spin-mass ratio relation of binary black hole mergers that evolved in isolation" by Sambaran Banerjee (Helmholtz-Instituts für Strahlen und Kernphysik, Germany) and Aleksandra Olejak (MPA Garching, Germany)
The fifth paper of the week, also published on Tuesday 30th June but in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics is “A systematic survey for hypervelocity runaways from thermonuclear supernovae” by Kareem El-Badry (Caltech, USA), and 18 others based in the USA, Germany, Austria and the UK. This paper presents a systematic survey of hypervelocity runaways, resulting from white dwarf explosions in binary systems. The findings suggest a diversity of remnant masses, ages, and heating mechanisms, challenging theoretical models.
The overlay for this one is here:
You can read the final version of this one on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "A systematic survey for hypervelocity runaways from thermonuclear supernovae" by Kareem El-Badry (Caltech, USA), and 18 others based in the USA, Germany, Austria and the UK.
The sixth and penultimate paper of this week is “Boris and Exponential Integrators in the Theory of Particles Interacting with Magnetic Turbulence” by Andreas Shalchi (U. Manitoba, Canada). This was published on Wednesday 1st July, in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (it is posted in the plasma physics section of aXiv but cross-listed in solar and stellar astrophysics). The study compares the Rodrigues and Boris integrators in test-particle simulations of charged particles interacting with magnetic fields, finding both methods yield similar results.
The overlay for this one is here:
You can find the final accepted version on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Boris and Exponential Integrators in the Theory of Particles Interacting with Magnetic Turbulence" by Andreas Shalchi (U. Manitoba, Canada)
The seventh and final paper for this week is “Inflation at the End of 2025: Constraints on $r$ and $n_S$ using the Latest CMB and BAO Data” by Lennart Balkenhol (Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, France) and 12 others based in France, Italy, Switzerland, UK, USA and Australia. This was also published on Wednesday 1st July, in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. This study presents constraints on parameters of inflationary models in cosmology, using the latest cosmic microwave background and baryon acoustic oscillation data. The findings help differentiate between inflation models.
The overlay for this one is here:
You can find the final accepted version of this one on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Inflation at the End of 2025: Constraints on $r$ and $n_S$ using the Latest CMB and BAO Data" by Lennart Balkenhol (Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, France) and 12 others based in France, Italy, Switzerland, UK, USA and Australia.
And that concludes this week’s update. We’re starting to catch up on the backlog generated in June. At just past the halfway point of the year, which is where we are, we’re on 136 papers, which suggests a total around 272 for the year.
I spent today in London, wandering about and visiting various locations I haven’t seen for a while, including the Science Museum (near where I’m staying) and Tate Modern (not near where I’m staying). The Science Museum has changed quite a bit since my last visit there many moons ago, but it still reminded me of Toby Esterhase’s description in Smiley’s People:
In the Science Museum, top floor. All those airplanes. Lot of kiddies eating crisps.
There was indeed a lot of kiddies, this being peak season for school trips, and the aeroplanes are still there. On the way from the Science Museum to Tate Modern, I bumped into some members of the union Unite from the Institute of Cancer Research who were at outside South Kensington tube station protesting about pay and conditions, and promised to send a message of solidarity on social media, which I hereby do.
Unite MembersOn the way to Tate Modern
Tate Modern was really good, if also busy with a lot of kiddies. I particularly enjoyed The Tanks, in one of which there is an eerily lit exhibition of Giacometti scupltures and another an installation by Nora Chipaumire called Gadzi, which includes sculpted and audio elements between which you can sit or move around. One of the interesting things about installations like this is watching what other people do: some were sitting on the large loudspeakers playing the music, others moving around to experience changes in the sonic experience.
After Tate Modern I dropped in at the HQ of the Elon Musk Appreciation Society Royal Society in Carlton House Terrace. This is the time of year for the annual Summer Science Exhbition. Note the Pride Progress flag flying outside. Inside was another lot of kiddies but quite a few adults too. Out of the thirteen exhibits, three were directly relevant to my own science area: one from the Simons Observatory, one from Durham University about galaxy formation simulations, and also one from Euclid. Here is Andy Taylor from Edinburgh at the latter, explaining B-modes to visitors:
The Pride Progress flag reminds me to explain, as if you hadn’t realized, that tomorrow (4th July) is the day of the Pride in London parade. Having a meeting to attend this week and another thing to do in London next week, it proved impossible to resist staying over the weekend. Now I’ll have to finish this blog as I have to meet a certain person off the train who is coincidentally flying in especially tonight to stay with me for this very special weekend.
P.S. It was very warm today, and set to get even warmer going into next week…
The latest in a sequence of claims of very large scale structures in the distribution that violate the cosmological principle emerged a week or so ago with a paper in Nature. The paper is behind a paywall but here is the abstract:
I’ve been nudged a few times by various people to comment on that but I’ve been busy recently and didn’t have time to look at the paper in detail. I had a quick look today and the thing that immediately struck me was that I didn’t understand the mock catalogues they used to compare the ΛCDM model with the observations. I still don’t understand that but I’ve stopped worrying about it because today I received a preprint (not behind a paywall, but on arXiv) from Till Sawala with the title The local galaxy distribution does not violate the cosmological principle and the (rather devastating) abstract:
The cosmological principle, which states that the Universe is statistically homogeneous and isotropic on sufficiently large scales, is a foundational assumption of the standard cosmological model. A recent analysis of DESI DR1 galaxy samples reported coherent anisotropic features in the local galaxy distribution extending to gigaparsec scales. If correct, this result would directly contradict the cosmological principle and motivate inhomogeneous cosmologies. Here I analyse the same data and compare them with galaxy distributions predicted by the FLAMINGO cosmological hydrodynamic simulation, performed in the standard ΛCDM paradigm. I show that the apparent anomaly disappears when the correct comoving distance scale is used. I also show that, rather than violating the cosmological principle, the observed structures are consistent with those expected in a ΛCDM Universe.
Here’s Figure 9 of the Sawala paper.
It seems that the authors of the Nature paper, Francesco Sylos Labini and Marco Galoppo, misinterpreted the distances of galaxies in the DESI DR1 sample in a way which boils down to an error of a factor (1+z)/h, where z is the redshift and h represents the Hubble constant. This hugely increases the scale and distorts the pattern of galaxy clustering. Using the correct comoving distance the measured structures are completely consistent with ΛCDM.
Oops!
P.S. I’ve stopped worrying about the mock surveys…
As seems to be the case quite often these days on such occasions, I was asked to deliver “some remarks” after the conference dinner this evening at 170 Queen’s Gate. Over the years I’ve come to realize that the best way to approach this sort of request is to keep it short, tell a few jokes, and be appropriately disrespectful. The bit about keeping it short is especially relevant when there are people in the audience who are not in the first flush of youth and who may need to answer a call of nature soon…
Unusually for such an occasion I had some slides to show but I’m not going to post any of the pictures here, except for this one:
I swear the the confusion about the occasion being celebrated was an honest mistake. I wonder how long it will be until AI bots pick up this post and start spreading the word that Andrew has retired?
So here I am, in that London. I’m attending a small meeting called A Random Universe which is celebrating the occasion of the 60th Birthday of cosmologist Andrew Jaffe. The meeting is being held at South Kensington Technical Imperial College and covers cosmology, statistics, topology, and a number of other things. The title comes from a book Andrew has published:
I’m ashamed to admit I haven’t read it yet – it was published last year – but I will do. An amusing thing is that I wanted to use that title for a book I wrote some time ago but the publisher rejected it! I also noticed just now that the book uses the definite article whereas the conference has the indefinite article.
I had other things to do yesterday so I missed the first day of the meeting, and my train into London was delayed by an hour because of “a cow on the line”, which necessitated a lengthy diversion via Coventry, so I missed much of this morning too. I did make some use of the time, though, publishing three papers in the Open Journal of Astrophysics using a commendably stable Wi-Fi connection on the train.
One thing I didn’t miss, however, was an interesting panel discussion under the title AI and Inference. There wasn’t much about inference in the discussion, but it did cover some interesting ground. Cosmologists are well used to Machine Learning, which is often claimed to be a form of Artificial Intelligence, though I wouldn’t classify it as such. In fact,the large survey analyses that constitute a major part of contemporary cosmological research would not be feasible without the deployment of machine learning methods. I think it’s likely that newer methods of Generative AI and Agentic systems based on Large Language Modules will lead to increases in scientific productivity in the short term too. Whatever happens in the longer term, several years in the future, is very hard to predict, but is likely to invilve big changes in the way science is done. I’ll just say that I’m not sorry that I will be retiring in two years!
Apparently the “Holy Grail” of the Tech Bros is to find ways of creating artificial “General Intelligence”. There was an audience vote about whether this would be accomplished with the five years or so some claim. I abstained, on the grounds that I really don’t know what “General Intelligence” is supposed to mean in the first place. I would also remind readers that the Holy Grail was an object of dubious significance the Quest for which consumed considerable resources and ultimately failed.
Another topic that came up is whether AI methods will ever be truly creative. This is an interesting question because I don’t think we know very much about how creativity in any form, including the intuitive leaps that have led to advances in science, arises in human brains. I wrote a post about “Light-bulb” moments here.
One immediate effect of LLMs on science is in the publishing world. At OJAp we are experiencing a tidal wave of AI-generated slop and other garbage. This is very wearisome and I think will only get worse. We don’t rule out the use of AI in papers at OJAp, but authors must disclose what they have done and how they have tested it. Things may change in the future, but I think that in the current era of science the big problem is not that AI methods can’t be used by good scientists for good research but that AI methods make it far too easy for fools to generate superficially plausible nonsense. I don’t see any easy solution to this but maybe there is an upside, in that will hasten the end of the system of academic publishing which has in any case long outlined its usefulness.
I’m all at sea. The ship is called the “James Joyce”. It took me a while to get onboard as the instructions were incredibly long and difficult to understand.
I decided to take this route to the UK for a change and I must say it is very civilised (if a bit slow). Dublin to Holyhead is 118km, further than I had thought.
Flaming June by Frederic Leighton (1895, Oil on Canvas, 120 ×120cm, Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico)
Since this June has seen a heatwave across Europe and even here in Ireland, I was reminded of the expression “Flaming June” which I thought until relatively recently was some sort of folk expression or quotation from a poem, but it is instead the title of this Pre-Raphaelite painting by Frederic Leighton of a lady wearing what looks like a dress made out of old curtains. Apparently the oleander branch seen in the upper right symbolizes the fragile link between sleep and death. It looks to me like she must be attending a seminar. You can read more about this painting here.
As well as a hugely popular artist in his lifetime (though his reputation has not endured), Leighton holds the record for the shortest ever peerage: he was made Baron Leighton just the day before he died. The title he had been given was to be hereditary but as he had no offspring the title became extinct at his death.
The spell of hot weather seems to have moderated somewhat: the temperature has fallen to a more civilised level in the low twenties and we’ve even had a little rain today. Last night, however, was very sultry. After dinner I stepped outside into the garden to get a bit of fresh air and was bathed in the wonderful scent of honeysuckle carried by a very gentle breeze from the far end of the garden.
The photograph was taken about 10pm, just after sunset. It reminded me of Tennyson’s “..the woodbine spices are wafted abroad”, though woodbine is technically Lonicera periclymenum (usually called European honeysuckle) while the flowers in my garden are of Lonicera japonica (Japanese honeysuckle). Going by previous experience, it will probably carry on flowering until late August.
It’s Saturday again so it’s time for another update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further three papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 129 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 577.
I will continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also show the DOI for each paper.
The first paper to report this week, published on Tuesday 23rd June, is “Interpretable machine learning of halo gas density profiles: a sensitivity analysis of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations” by Daniele Sorini & Sownak Bose (Durham University, UK), Mathilda Denison (U. Penn., USA) and Romeel Davé (University of Edinburgh, UK). This study uses cosmological hydrodynamical simulations and a random forest algorithm to understand how feedback processes affect the gas distribution in galaxies by predicting gas density profiles in various models. It is published in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies.
The overlay for this paper is here
You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:
New Publication atthe Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Interpretable machine learning of halo gas density profiles: a sensitivity analysis of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations" by Daniele Sorini & Sownak Bose (Durham U., UK), Mathilda Denison (U. Penn., USA) and Romeel Davé (U. Edinburgh, UK)
The second paper for this week, published on Wednesday June 24th in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies is “Dual-disk galaxies and thermal states of circumgalactic medium” by Masafumi Noguchi (Tohoku University, Japan). This paper explores the suggestion that the transition from thick to dual-disk galaxies is influenced by thermal changes in the circumgalactic medium (CGM), which also affects star formation.
The overlay looks like this:
The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Dual-disk galaxies and thermal states of circumgalactic medium" by Masafumi Noguchi (Tohoku University, Japan).
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Mass Transfer in Tidally Heated Stars Orbiting Massive Black Holes and Implications for Repeating Nuclear Transients" by Philippe Z. Yao and Eliot Quataert (Princeton University, USA)
And that concludes this week’s update. It has been another slow week on the publishing front. We have a steadily growing backlog of papers accepted for publication but with final versions yet to appear on arXiv. I suppose it’s the holidays…
P.S. The other day I checked the stats for the Open Journal of Astrophysics and saw that we’ve passed 8,000 citations. The average number of citations per paper is 14.0, which is not bad when you consider that over half the papers were published under a year ago…
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In the Dark 