Archive for May, 2025

Newer Entries »

Guiding Lights

Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags , , , on May 8, 2025 by telescoper

Just a quick post to mention that this afternoon the Physics Department held a nice event about Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. Although today is the penultimate day of teaching, so many undergraduate students will have been busy finishing off their final assignments, it was well attended. I had to miss the first hour as I was involved in the Computational Physics lab until 4pm, so I missed the two presentations, but I took part in the panel discussion (that was largely about the results of a recent student survey held in the Department) and (of course) stayed for a glass of wine at the end. Well, done to the organizers (James, Emma and Graham) for organizing this event, which I hope will be the first of many!

Leave a comment »

Reminder: Darkness into Light

Posted in Maynooth, Mental Health with tags , , on May 8, 2025 by telescoper

With your permission (or indeed without it) please let me remind you that taking part in Darkness Into Light in Maynooth on Saturday, 10th May, from 4.15am, to raise vital funds for Pieta and people affected by suicide and self-harm. This is only a couple of days away so please donate if you can.

You can help keep Pieta’s essential services FREE and available to anyone who needs them by donating now to help me reach my fundraising goal. Every euro counts. Even a small donation can make a big impact. You can contribute to my fundraiser here.

Thank you so much for your support

Leave a comment »

The Pope, the Atheist, a Black Cat and Dave Allen

Posted in Biographical, Television with tags , , , , , on May 7, 2025 by telescoper

Today is the day that 133 Cardinals gather in the Vatican to enter the autoclave (is this right? Ed) in which they will elect the next Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church. Good luck to them, as it seems like they will be under a lot of pressure for the next few days.

For some reason this news reminded me of the late great Irish comedian Dave Allen. He was hugely popular on British TV in the 70s and 80s. He had his own show in a prime-time slot on Saturday evenings on BBC1 for many years, which was mandatory family viewing in our house. The show included some pre-recorded sketches but I think the best bits involved him just sitting, talking and telling stories. He wasn’t a stand-up comedian. He didn’t often tell jokes either, his humour was mainly observational and satirical, especially about politics and religion. Although an atheist he never really mocked religious belief, but he did make fun of the pomposity and hypocrisy that often goes with it.

I found this quote in which he expresses thoughts about hierarchies very close to mine:

The hierarchy of everything in my life has always bothered me. I’m bothered by power. People, whoever they might be, whether it’s the government, or the policeman in the uniform, or the man on the door—they still irk me a bit.

Anyway, here he is telling a joke that seems relevant.

P.S. He always made out that the glass on the table beside him contained whisky, but it was always just a dash of ginger ale with an ice cube in it.

1 Comment »

An AI Guide to Europe

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Barcelona with tags , , , on May 6, 2025 by telescoper

To assist those readers who might be planning conference trips or vacations in Europe I thought I’d share this helpful map (which I found here) that was generated by one of those famously accurate AI apps. There may be a few small errors, but I’m sure they are insignificant:

Apart from everything else, this explains why I found Barcelona much warmer than I had expected when I was there last year…

1 Comment »

Examinations in May

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags , , , on May 5, 2025 by telescoper

In the Irish language, the month of May is called Bealtaine after the old Celtic festival that marks the mid-point between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice. May Day is Lá Bealtaine, one of the so-called Cross-Quarter Days that lie halfway between the equinoxes and solstices. The Bank Holiday associated with this day is not May 1st, as it is throughout Europe, but the first Monday of May, which this year means today. I’m therefore officially off work, though I have quite a few things to do so will be working from home for most of today.

This Bank Holiday offers a bit of a breather before the end of teaching term (Friday May 9th) and the start of the Examination period (Friday May 16th). There are just four more days of teaching, and I have just a couple more lectures to do. In a normal week I would have a Particle Physics tutorial this Monday afternoon, but instead I have offered to do one next Monday (12th) to go through the last assignment which is due in on Friday. The examination for Particle Physics is on 27th May, which is one of the last of the year; this is a final-year module so for many students it will be their last examination at Maynooth.

My Computational Physics students are working on their projects which are due in on Friday 9th; that gives me about a week to grade them before the examinations start. The Computational Physics written examination is on Monday May 19th and if all goes to plan I will have the projects marked before I embark on the examination scripts. Instead of formal teaching sessions, the computing lab, together with demonstrator assistance, is at the disposal of the students for their projects during this time. I anticipate plenty of last-minute acitivity in Thursday’s session!

Anyway, on Friday I have to give a Departmental Colloquium as well as my final Particle Physics lecture. Then, to mark the end of teaching, I’m going to the National Concert Hall to listen to some music. The next morning I’ll have to get up very early for the Darkness Into Light, which involves a 5km walk ending at sunrise.

After next week attention will turn to examinations. For me that’s not only in Maynooth. I haven’t mentiond it on here before but I have agreed to act as External Examiner for undergraduate Physics programmes at Imperial College, London, for the next few years. The meeting of the Examination Board there is not until July, which is long after ours in Maynooth so there will be no clash, but I have been doing some work (vetting papers, etc) alongside my own work. The examinations at Imperial take place roughly alongside ours, but there are so many more students there than at Maynooth that a longer time is needed for grading the scripts so the end of the process is much later.

In the past, I’ve been External Examiner in a number of UK universities. The last was Cambridge, in fact, where my term ended in 2017 while I was still working in Cardiff. I haven’t done any since moving to Ireland: being Head of Department, especially during lockdown, did not allow me the time. My term as External at Imperial will last until I retire, so this is the last such job I’ll be doing.

There’s quite a lot of work involved with being an External Examiner, but I always find it interesting to see how other institutions run their programmes. As well as providing feedback and, if necessary, advice to the Institution I always pick up interesting ideas from them too. Imperial’s Physics programmes are much broader than ours, so there’s a huge difference in scale, but I’m sure there will be things to learn. I mean in general terms, of course. All the details are confidential, for obvious reasons.

Leave a comment »

Wyn Evans for Chancellor of Cambridge University!

Posted in Biographical, Education, Harassment Bullying etc with tags , , , , on May 4, 2025 by telescoper

I thought I’d post a quick follow-up to this post about the campaign by Prof. Wyn Evans to be the next Chancellor of Cambridge University. When I posted that item, Wyn was seeking enough nominations to stand for election. I’m very glad to pass on the news that he got over 100 nominations, more than twice the number required to stand for election. He is therefore an official candidate for the election that will take place in July. I am a graduate of Cambridge University and have registered to vote in the forthcoming election.

P.S. This all reminds me that a mere 40 years ago I was preparing for my finals at Cambridge. I still have the papers I sat then and will share them on the anniversary for old times’ sake. The first papers were on Wednesday 22nd May 1985.

4 Comments »

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 03/05/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 3, 2025 by telescoper

Saturday morning once again, and time for another update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. It’s been a recording-breaking week: since the last update we have published no fewer than ten papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 54 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 289.

The first paper to report is “Subspace Approximations to the Focused Transport Equation of Energetic Particles, I. The Standard Form” by B. Kippenstein & A. Shalchi (U. Manitoba, Canada). This paper, which was published on Monday 28th April 2025, presents a hybrid analytical-numerical method to solve the Fokker-Planck equation for the transport of energetic particles. It is published in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

Next is “The Importance of Subtleties in the Scaling of the ‘Terminal Momentum’ For Galaxy Formation Simulations” by Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech, USA). This presents a technical discussion of issues surrounding the proper modelling of supernova blast waves and their effects in numerical simulations of galaxy formation. It was published on Tuesday 29th April 2025 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The overlay is here:

The final version can be found on arXic here.

Next one up is “Local variations of the radial metallicity gradient in a simulated NIHAO-UHD Milky Way analogue and their implications for (extra-)galactic studies” by Sven Buder (ANU, Australia), Tobias Buck (U. Heidelberg, Germany), Qian-Hui Chen (ANU) and Kathryn Grasha (ANU). This one was also published on Tuesday 29th April 2025 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It describes a numerical study of the variation of chemical abundance with radial position in galaxies and the implications of this for galaxy formation. Here is the overlay:

and you can find the final accepted version on arXiv here.

The fourth paper this week is “Zooming In On The Multi-Phase Structure of Magnetically-Dominated Quasar Disks: Radiation From Torus to ISCO Across Accretion Rates” by Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech, USA) and 14 others based in the USA and Canada. This was also published on Tuesday 29th April 2025 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It presents very detailed numerical study of the structure of magnetized quasar accretion disks. The overlay is here:

You can find the official final version on arXiv here.

Next is “Tomographic halo model of the unWISE-Blue galaxies using cross-correlations with BOSS CMASS galaxies” by Alex Krolewski, Jensen Lawrence, and Will J. Percival (U. Waterloo, Canada). This one was also published on 29th April 2025, which was a busy day(!), but in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics.  This paper describes using the halo model to create mock samples unWISE-Blue galaxies, applicable to other tomographic cross-correlations between photometric samples and narrowly-binned spectroscopic samples. The overlay is here:

The final version of this one can be found on the arXiv here.

Number six for this week is “StratLearn-z: Improved photo-estimation from spectroscopic data subject to selection effects” by Chiara Moretti (SISSA, Trieste, Italy), Maximilian Autenrieth (Imperial College, UK), Riccardo Serra (SISSA), Roberto Trotta (SISSA), David A. van Dyk (Imperial) and Andrei Mesinger (SNS Pisa, Italy). This was published on Thursday 1st May 2025 in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. This one is about estimating photometric redshifts using an approach that relies on splitting the source and target datasets into strata based on estimated propensity score. The overlay is here:

 

The official version can be found on arXiv here.

Next is “The Impact of Galaxy-halo Size Relations on Galaxy Clustering Signals” by Joshua B. Hill and Yao-Yuan Mao (U. Utah, USA). This one was also published on May 2nd 2025 and is in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It discusses the challenge of identifying a specific galaxy halo property that controls galaxy sizes through constraints from galaxy clustering alone. The overlay is here:

You can find the official version of the paper on arXiv here.

The next paper is “Detection of Thermal Emission at Millimeter Wavelengths from Low-Earth Orbit Satellites” by Allen Foster (Princeton, USA) and an international cast of 90 others, which is too many to list individually. This one was also published on Thursday May 1st but is in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics.  The paper discusses the experimental detection of thermal emission from satellites and a discussion of the implications for astrophysical observations, especially time-domain astronomy. The overlay is here:

You can find the final version of the paper on arXiv here.

The penultimate paper of this week is “Pseudo-Cls for spin-s fields with component-wise weighting” by David Alonso (U. Oxford, UK). This one was published yesterday (Friday 2nd May 2025).  The paper presents an approach to power spectrum estimation appropriate for data with anisotropic noise properties or for which complicated masks are required.  It can be found in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. The overlay is here:

 

The final version of this paper is on arXiv here.

The last paper this week is “The past, present and future of observations of externally irradiated disks” by Planet formation environments collaboration: Megan Allen (U. Sheffield, UK) and 52 others. This paper was published on Friday 2nd May in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics.  It presents a review of research on the effects of the ultraviolet radiation environment on protoplanetary disc evolution and planet formation. The overlay is here:

You can find the final version on arXiv here.

That’s all the papers for this week. I’ll just add that there were quite a few gremlins at Crossref this week, particularly yesterday. I usually do the publishing first thing in the morning but yesterday’s papers were held in a queue for most of the day pending registration. Usually it just takes a few minutes, but for these I had to wait several hours but we got there in the end. Although ten papers is more than we have ever published in a week, we still haven’t had a week in which we’ve published on every working day!

Anyway, that’s all for this week. I’ll post another update next Saturday.

1 Comment »

Euclid on Sky

Posted in Euclid, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on May 2, 2025 by telescoper

I haven’t posted much recently about the European Space Agency’s Euclid Mission but I’ve got an excuse to remedy that today as I’ve just seen that the Special Issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics called Euclid on Sky has at last been published (with a date of 30th April 2025). This contains the main mission and instrument overview papers as well as scientific papers relating to the Early Release Observations. All the individual papers have been on arXiv for some time already.

You can access the Special Issue here.

The main mission overview paper has 1139 authors (including yours truly); that’s definitely the longest author list I’ve ever been on! The arXiv version has been available for almost a year and has already got 254 citations. Here is the abstract:

The current standard model of cosmology successfully describes a variety of measurements, but the nature of its main ingredients, dark matter and dark energy, remains unknown. Euclid is a medium-class mission in the Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 programme of the European Space Agency (ESA) that will provide high-resolution optical imaging, as well as near-infrared imaging and spectroscopy, over about 14,000 deg^2 of extragalactic sky. In addition to accurate weak lensing and clustering measurements that probe structure formation over half of the age of the Universe, its primary probes for cosmology, these exquisite data will enable a wide range of science. This paper provides a high-level overview of the mission, summarising the survey characteristics, the various data-processing steps, and data products. We also highlight the main science objectives and expected performance.

Here’s Figure 1.

2 Comments »

May and the Poets – Leigh Hunt

Posted in Poetry with tags , , , , on May 1, 2025 by telescoper

I almost forgot that today is Poetry Day Ireland which this year has a theme of “May Day” so here’s a romantic yet whimsical offering that seems tailor-made to mark the start of the month of May.

There is May in books forever;
May will part from Spenser never;
May's in Milton, May's in Prior,
May's in Chaucer, Thomson, Dyer;
May's in all the Italian books:—
She has old and modern nooks,
Where she sleeps with nymphs and elves,
In happy places they call shelves,
And will rise and dress your rooms
With a drapery thick with blooms.
Come, ye rains, then if ye will,
May's at home, and with me still;
But come rather, thou, good weather,
And find us in the fields together.

by James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859)

Leave a comment »

Darkness into Light

Posted in Maynooth, Mental Health with tags , , on May 1, 2025 by telescoper

Just a quick note to advertise that I’m taking part in Darkness Into Light in Maynooth on Saturday, 10th May, from 4.15am, to raise vital funds for Pieta and people affected by suicide and self-harm.

You can help keep Pieta’s essential services FREE and available to anyone who needs them by donating now to help me reach my fundraising goal. Every euro counts. Even a small donation can make a big impact. You can contribute to my fundraiser here.

Together, we can light up the darkness and create a brighter future for everyone.

Thank you so much for your support

2 Comments »

Newer Entries »