Archive for August, 2025

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Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarships & Postdoctoral Fellowships

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth with tags , , on August 31, 2025 by telescoper
Close Up of Highlighting Specific Word Research in a Dictionary

While I remember, and before I get caught up in start-of-term things, I thought I would pass on news that two calls administered by Research Ireland will open on September 11th. These are the Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarships and the Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowships. These are open to applications from candidates anywhere in the world.

You can find information about the Postgraduate Scholarships here and the Postdoctoral Fellowships here. The postdoctoral positions are for one or two years; postgraduate positions are for 2 years (Research Masters) or 4 years (PhD).

The application deadline is 23rd October 2025 and positions of both types are to start on 1st September 2026. You will need to contact possible supervisors at your planned host institute in advance of application so there isn’t much time.

Anyone interested in applying to hold one of these positions in Maynooth is welcome to contact me privately for advice or assistance. Given my rapidly approaching retirement, however, I am not able to act as nominated supervisor for postgraduate positions. I would happily support an applicant for a postdoctoral fellowship in the area of cosmology. There are of course many other potential supervisors both at Maynooth and elsewhere.

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It’s That Time of Year Again

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags , , , on August 31, 2025 by telescoper

Today is the last day of August, which, according to my calculations, means that tomorrow is the first day of September. Last week the kids started to go back to school and some of course started for the first time. I think the schools vary in the timetable for new arrivals and returning students, but they’re basically all operating fully from tomorrow, Monday 1st September.

Universities start back a little later, though this also varies. In Maynooth, Orientation Week (for new students) begins on September 15th, and lectures commence for all years on September 22nd, which happens to be the day of the Autumnal Equinox. My first lecture of the new academic year is on that day. I don’t know how many students I’ll have in my class yet. It’s a 4th-year class, and those students don’t register for modules until Friday 12th September, at the end of a week that begins with new students starting to enrol on Monday 8th September.

The first week of September will therefore be a bit quieter in the University than in the local schools. Next week sees a number of conferring ceremonies at which students who completed their studies with the examinations in May will receive their degrees. That includes a number of Physics students, who will graduate on Wednesday 3rd September. Unfortunately, when I tried to register to attend the ceremony, a few weeks ago, I was unable to because it was booked up so I’ll have to send my congratulations virtually. In any case, Conferring ceremonies at Maynooth are not what they used to be. Instead of the atmospheric surroundings of the Aula Maxima, they are now held in the soulless environnment of a lecture theatre. Instead of a nice buffet reception afterwards the graduates used to get, they now get a cup of tea in a paper cup and (if they’re lucky) a very small Danish pastry. It’s quite embarrassing actually. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in future, graduands were told to being their own sandwiches and a thermos flask. Anyway, a PhD student of mine will attend a conferring ceremony at the end of October. I’ll have to ensure I register on time for that one as I will be reading out the title of her thesis. Our first cohort of MSc students will graduate then too.

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Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 30/08/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 30, 2025 by telescoper

Once again it’s time for a summary of the week’s new papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published three new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 125, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 360.

The first paper to report this week is “Large-scale surveys of the quasar proximity effect” by Rupert Croft, Patrick Shaw & Ann-Marsha Alexis (Carnegie Mellon University; CMU), Nianyi Chen (Princeton), Yihao Zhou & Tiziana Di Matteo (CMU), Simeon Bird (UC Riverside), Patrick Lachance (CMU), and Yueying Ni (Harvard). This paper was published on Monday 25th August in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. It presents a CDM-based halo model of the quasar proximity effect, tested on quasar Lyman-alpha spectra from the ASTRID cosmological simulation, including self-consistent formation of quasar black holes and the intergalactic medium.

The overlay is here:

 

You can make this larger by clicking on it, as you can with all the overlays below. The officially accepted version of this paper can be found on the arXiv here.

The second paper this week, also published on Monday 25th August, but in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “Redshift evolution of Lyman continuum escape fraction after JWST” by Andrea Ferrara (Pisa), M. Giavalisco (UMass Amherst), L. Pentericci (Rome), E. Vanzella (Bologna), A. Calabrò (Rome) and M. Llerena (Rome). This paper is about the Attenuation-Free Model (AFM) for galaxies, in which radiation-driven outflows develop once the galaxy specific star formation rate exceeds a certain level, which is tested on data with positive results. The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

The third and final paper this week is “Primordial black holes in cosmological simulations: growth prospects for supermassive black holes” by Lewis R Prole, John A Regan, Daxal Mehta & Peter Coles (National University of Ireland, Maynooth) and Pratika Dayal (Groningen, NL). This one was published in Astrophysics of Galaxies folder on Thursday 28th August 2025. You can read more about this paper here: basically it studies the growth of primordial black holes in the early Universe using numerical simulations, with implications for the subsequent formation of massive black holes.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version of this one on arXiv here.

And that’s all the papers for this week. It’s still a bit slow as we emerge from the summer vacations, but I expect things will start to pick up from now on.

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Working for Elsevier…

Posted in Open Access with tags , on August 29, 2025 by telescoper

I found this on Mastodon and, for obvious reasons, couldn’t resist sharing it here:

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Primordial Black Holes in Cosmological Simulations – Update

Posted in Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on August 28, 2025 by telescoper

Just time for a quick update about a paper that I posted about at the start of the summer, when it appeared on arXiv. At that time it had already gained a bit of traction in the media, e.g. here. Well, the paper is now published in the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Obviously, as an author I was conflicted so not involved in the editorial process.

Here is the overlay:

For those of you not in the field, there is currently a big mystery about how galaxies we have found at high redshift with JWST managed to acquire massive black holes so early in the Universe’s evolution. Black holes can grow quickly in a dense environment by accreting mass onto an initial seed, but what are the seeds? In this paper we investigate the possibility that they were primordial black holes. These form directly from fluctuations in the early Universe, as opposed to astrophysical black holes which form from stellar collapse. We don’t know exactly what mass primordial black holes would have nor how numerous they would be, but this paper uses high-resolution numerical experiments to investigate their effects if they do exist.

Here’s a pretty picture which is a zoom into 200 pc of the full simulation. I think 10pc counts as high resolution for a cosmological simulation! The blue circle shows the most massive PBH in the simulation, the green circle shows its nearest neighbour. The colour scale represents the number-density of dark matter particles.

For more details, read the paper!

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A Day of Offerings

Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags , , , , , , , on August 27, 2025 by telescoper

Today (27th August) is the day that students across Ireland receive offers of places at Third-Level Institutions to start next month. The offers for all courses and all institutions are available on the official CAO website here; they are also widely available elsewhere, including this searchable list.

The official numbers for Maynooth are here. Minimum points required for Maynooth’s – and indeed Ireland’s – most important course, MH206 Theoretical Physics and Mathematics, are 520 this year, up a little from 513 last year. MH204 Physics with Astrophysics is 385, up two points on last year’s 383. MH201 General Science (of which Physics is a part) is on 352 points, up two from 350 last year. Just for comparison, the points for these courses from 10 years ago were: MH206 550; MH204 480; and MH201 435, all significantly higher than this year.

Maynooth’s biggest course (by student numbers) – and indeed the biggest course in Ireland reckoned that way – is the Omnibus Arts programme MH101 which has an entry level this year of just 300 CAO points. Ten years ago it was 390.

It seems the first-round entry points for most courses at Maynooth have not changed dramatically despite the reduction in Leaving Certificate grades this year after several years of artificial inflation over the Covid-19 years. Leaving Certificate results are just one factor in determining the CAO points for a particular course at a particular Institution. Overall the picture is rather complex. Across Ireland, points are up for about 50% of courses and down for about 42%. The CAO points needed for a course is largely a matter of demand versus capacity rather than academic performance. For the last few years Maynooth University has been recruiting more and more students, putting pressure on accommodation, teaching loads and campus space. This strategy will prevent any significant rise in CAO points for the foreseeable future. This is probably happening to some extent across the sector, though Maynooth has a more urgent need for more students: to pay for the legions of new managers it has appointed. Two new €100K managerial jobs have been advertised so far this week…

All this just concerns the first round of offers so things may change significantly over the next week or two. Students now have to decide whether to accept their first-round offer or try to change course. They have until next week to do this. Departments won’t know how many new students they have for a while yet.

Update: Thursday 28th August. Here is the traditional  Irish Times First Round Offers supplement.

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Blu Tack Art

Posted in Art, Maynooth with tags , , on August 26, 2025 by telescoper

My attention was drawn today to this scuplture which is currently on display in the Department of Physics at Maynooth University. The artist and subject are unknown (to me) and the work is not dated, but the material is clearly Blu Tack, a putty-like pressure-sensitive adhesive commonly used to attach lightweight objects to walls, doors or other dry surfaces.

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Five Years at Home in Maynooth

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19, Maynooth with tags , , , , on August 26, 2025 by telescoper

I’ve received a number of bills and renewal notices of various kinds over the last few weeks, indicating the anniversary of me completing the purchase of, and moving into, my house in Maynooth. In fact it was five years ago today that I wrote a blog post occasioned by the fact that I’d collected the keys to this property, though it wasn’t until the following weekend that I actually stayed overnight here for the first time.

I was very lucky to be able to able to buy this property in what turned out to be a short window in the Covid-19 lockdown restrictions in the Summer of 2020. There were plans to return to on-campus teaching in September with drastic restrictions on the number of students in each venue. That plan was subsequently changed and then changed again to move almost all teaching back online, and then again to move again into a “Level 5” lockdown.

I was Head of Department back then. My memories of that time were immense levels of stress and frustration, constantly having to change our teaching arrangements with very little support from the University as well as shouldering a full teaching load. In order for the institution to carry on functioning, all teaching and support staff to do huge amounts of unpaid overtime while the institution built up a massive financial surplus. I could say more about the callous indifference to staff and students alike shown at that time by one particular member of The Management, but I think I had better save it for when I’ve retired.

Given the enormous workload I had then, it was to be almost another year before I had time to collect most of my belongings from my house in Cardiff and longer still before I managed to sell it and pay off the mortgage I took out to buy my house here. All this was much more complicated than I expected when I moved to Ireland!

Anyway, many of the things I’d planned to do when I moved here still aren’t done. I bought some old furniture from the previous owner with the intention of replacing it with new, for example, but I somehow never got round to that. Nor have I replaced the old windows, gutters, etc, yet…

One thing I have done is change the refuse collection. When I moved in I took over a contract with  Bord na Móna (literally “The Turf Board”), a company set up in 1946 to supply peat as a form of fuel but now diversified into other activities such as collecting and disposing waste. Over the last year the service provided by this company has degenerated to the point of complete unreliability. When I looked around for a replacement I found that Bord na Móna was also significantly more expensive than its competitors. Earlier this summer, therefore, I swtiched to a company called Greyhound which so far seems much better organized and is about 2/3 the price. That meant I had two sets of wheelie bins cluttering up my garden for about two months until Bord na Móna got around to removing theirs.

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Our Million-Dollar Journal!

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , on August 25, 2025 by telescoper

The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publishing a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) is now £2356. Converting that to dollars at current rates gives about $3150 per paper.

As of today, 25th August 2025, the Open Journal of Astrophysics has published 359 articles.

Using the dollar cost of an MNRAS APC as a benchmark – many journals charge more – this means that we have now saved the global astrophysics community about $1.1M (for an outlay of around $10K).

Yes, we are still a small journal but the size of that figure should help you understand how much money is being wasted globally on publishing fees that could instead be spent on actual research.

It’s good to see that more and more researchers are seeing the light and switching to Diamond Open Access. Today we published the 124th article in Volume 8 (2025) of the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This means that we have so far in 2025 published more papers than we published in the whole of 2024. At the end of August we will be about two-thirds of the way through the year so I expect we will publish more than 180 articles this year.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone involved in running this journal: the Editors, staff at Maynooth University Library who help us, the host of volunteer referees, and of course our authors. I’m confident that, together, we can change the publishing landscape in astrophysics, and put the power (and money) back in the hands of researchers instead of greedy publishers.

This is a slightly-edited version of a post I made last week for the Open Journal of Astrophysics blog.

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More Google Garbage

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , on August 24, 2025 by telescoper

I couldn’t resist sharing this as part of an occasional series about Google AI Garbage. Earlier this evening (Sunday 24th August 2025), I searched to see if there was a BBC Proms concert this evening. This is what the AI summary produced. I think it’s priceless, right down to the last line!

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