Archive for November, 2025

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 22/11/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 22, 2025 by telescoper

It’s Saturday again, so it’s time for the usual update of the week’s new papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published another five papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 180, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 415.

The first paper to report this week is “Probing Anisotropic Cosmic Birefringence with Foreground-Marginalised SPT B-mode Likelihoods” by Lennart Balkenhol (Sorbonne Université, France), A. Coerver (UC Berkeley, USA), C. L. Reichardt (U. Melbourne, Australia) and J. A. Zebrowski (U. Chicago, USA). This paper was published on Monday November 17th in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. It presents a way of using data from the Souh Pole Telescope (SPT) in the CMB-lite framework to constrain the level of cosmic birefringence.  The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the The Fediverse announcement is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Probing Anisotropic Cosmic Birefringence with Foreground-Marginalised SPT B-mode Likelihoods" by Lennart Balkenhol (Sorbonne Université, France), A. Coerver (UC Berkeley, USA), C. L. Reichardt (U. Melbourne, Australia) and J. A. Zebrowski (U. Chicago, USA)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.147459

November 17, 2025, 8:43 am 1 boosts 0 favorites

The second paper of the week is “Radio Observations of a Candidate Redback Millisecond Pulsar: 1FGL J0523.5-2529” by Owen. A. Johnson & E. F. Keane (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland), D. J. McKenna (ASTRON, NL), H. Qiu (SKAO, UK), S. J. Swihart (Insitute for Defense Analyses, USA), J. Strader (Michigan State U., USA) and M. McLaughlin (West Virginia U., USA). This one was published on Tuesday November 18th 2025 in the folder marked High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena and it describes a search for radio emission from a candidate “redback pulsar” J0523.5-2529 resulting in upper limits but no detection.

The overlay is here:

You can find the official version of this one on arXiv here. The federated announcement on Mastodon is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Radio Observations of a Candidate Redback Millisecond Pulsar: 1FGL J0523.5-2529" by Owen. A. Johnson & E. F. Keane (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland), D. J. McKenna (ASTRON, NL), H. Qiu (SKAO, UK), S. J. Swihart (Insitute for Defense Analyses, USA), J. Strader (Michigan State U., USA) and M. McLaughlin (West Virginia U., USA)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.147516

November 18, 2025, 8:42 am 1 boosts 0 favorites

Next one up is “The role of turbulence in setting the phase of the ISM and implications for the star formation rate” by Tine Colman (Université Paris-Saclay, France) and 13 others based in France, Germany, Italy and the UK. This was published in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies on Tuesday November 18th. It descrtibes using a suite of stratified box simulations to explore the link between star formation, turbulence and the thermal state of the multi-phase interstellar medium (ISM).

The overlay is here:

You can find the official accepted version on arXiv here. The fediverse announcement is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "The role of turbulence in setting the phase of the ISM and implications for the star formation rate" by Tine Colman (Université Paris-Saclay, France) and 13 others based in France, Germany, Italy and the UK.

doi.org/10.33232/001c.147517

November 19, 2025, 8:19 am 0 boosts 0 favorites

The fourth paper of the week is “A Bimodal Metallicity Distribution Function in the Ultra-Faint Dwarf Galaxy Reticulum II” by Alice M. Luna (U. Chicago, USA) and 8 others based in the USA, Korea and Canada. This was published on Wednesday November 19th in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It decribes low-resolution Magellan/IMACS spectroscopy of 167 stars in the ultra-faint galaxy Reticulum II, revealing a clearly bimodal distribution.

The overlay is here:

You can find the official published version on arXiv here. The Fediverse announcement follows:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "A Bimodal Metallicity Distribution Function in the Ultra-Faint Dwarf Galaxy Reticulum II" by Alice M. Luna (U. Chicago, USA) and 8 others based in the USA, Korea and Canada.

doi.org/10.33232/001c.147696

November 19, 2025, 8:37 am 0 boosts 0 favorites

The fifth and final paper for this week is “Cool Gas in the Circumgalactic Medium of Massive Post Starburst Galaxies” by Zoe Harvey, Sahyadri Krishna, Vivienne Wild & Rita Tojeiro (U. St Andrews, UK) and Paul Hewett (U. Cambridge, UK). This was published on Thursday November 20th in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies.

The overlay is here:

The officially accepted version can be found on arXiv here. The Fediverse announcement is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Cool Gas in the Circumgalactic Medium of Massive Post Starburst Galaxies" by Zoe Harvey, Sahyadri Krishna, Vivienne Wild & Rita Tojeiro (U. St Andrews, UK) and Paul Hewett (U. Cambridge, UK)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.147836

November 20, 2025, 9:02 am 1 boosts 0 favorites

And that concludes the update for this week. I will do another next Saturday.

Visiting Speaker

Posted in Maynooth, OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on November 21, 2025 by telescoper

I’ve been playing host today to my former PhD student, now at the University of Vienna, Mateja Gosenca, who gave a talk on “Ultralight Dark Matter: Phenomenology and Observational Constraints”. Mateja did an MSc at the University of Sussex before doing a PhD under my supervision, so it is very nice to have her visit us in Maynooth.

It was only when I started to think about how to introduce her Colloquium that I remembered that Mateja was co-author of the very first paper published by the Open Journal of Astrophysics, way back in 2016. At that time we were running an experimental prototype site before switching to the Scholastica platform we now use, but it was still a landmark. We’ve now published 415 papers.

Update: Obligatory pub photograph

Stardust – Michael D. Higgins

Posted in Poetry with tags , , , , on November 20, 2025 by telescoper

by Michael D. Higgins (b. 1941), former President of the Republic of Ireland.

Here he is reading the poem from the President’s Office.

Queen’s University Belfast and Dundalk IT (not Maynooth?)

Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags , , , on November 19, 2025 by telescoper

A couple of years ago I posted an item about the news of a proposed merger of Maynooth University and Dundalk Institute of Technology. That piece began with the following:

Life is full of surprises, especially if you’re a member of academic staff at Maynooth University.

Today it was revealed that the institution that employs me is planning to merge with Dundalk Institute of Technology. It was revealed not in a direct message to staff, but through an article in the national media, in this case the Sunday Independent. The article there is paywalled but there is another piece here.

This is astonishing news, not least because of the way it has come out. Yet again, the only way that staff at Maynooth can find out what’s going on is through the newspapers. Senior Management don’t deign to inform us of anything…

Not surprisingly I hadn’t heard anything about how the proposed merger was progressing except for a couple of items in the national media. For example, in May this year, there was an announcement of the formation of a Regional Graduate Academy linking postgraduate education in Dundalk and Maynooth.

Today, however, I saw another news item announcing that Dundalk IT has now decided to become a College of Queen’s University Belfast. It explains:

The new partnership between Queens University Belfast and Dundalk Institute of Technology is not a “parent child relationship,” and represents the first “all-Ireland university”, the Minister for Further and Higher Education has said.

DkIT is set to become a University College following the agreement with QUB, which will see it change from an IT to a University College of Queen’s University Belfast.

What does this new new relationship between DkIT and QUB mean for the old new relationship between DkIT and Maynooth University? Have they called the Maynooth-Dundalk merger off? Or will the three institutions form a ménage à trois?

Don’t ask me. I only work here. Perhaps I’ll be able to find out by reading the newspapers.

P.S. Coincidentally, the next “President’s Update” for staff at Maynooth, scheduled for December, has been postponed until the New Year.

P.P.S. It is about 80km from Belfast to Dundalk and about 100km from Dundalk to Maynooth.

It’s LGBTQIA+ STEM Day!

Posted in LGBTQ+, Maynooth with tags , , , , on November 18, 2025 by telescoper

Just a quick post to point out that today is LGBTQIA+ STEM Day, which aims to celebrate  to celebrate the work of LGBTQIA+ people in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), but also to highlight the barriers still facing us.

For more information see here.

This also provides an opportunity for me to send my best wishes to all LGBTQIA+ staff and students at Maynooth and around the world! As far as I know, my Employer is not marking this occasion. This surprises me as it is not unknown for them to engage in pinkwashing from time to time, whenever it suits them for some reason.

P.S. I’m reminded that it was 22 years ago today that Section 28 was finally repealed in England and Wales. With reactionary fforces around the world attacking our hard-won rights, it is important that we cling on to what we’ve got.

Principia for Sale

Posted in History, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on November 17, 2025 by telescoper

With Christmas approaching, you may be looking for gift ideas so I thought I would pass on this advertisement:

The book concerned is a First Edition of the Continental Issue of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, dated 1687.

For more details see here. The estimate is “only” €100,000, which seems to me a bit on the low side. A similar volume was listed by Christie’s in 2016 as $1,000,000 to $1,500,000 but in the end sold for $3.7 million. This one has had some repairs and is slightly browned with age, but has an interesting provenance. I’d be surprised if it didn’t fetch at least a million. We’ll find out in a week!

Concerning Muskopedia

Posted in Politics with tags , , , , on November 16, 2025 by telescoper

A colleague sent me this arXiv paper. The abstract reads:

Elon Musk released Grokipedia on 27 October 2025 to provide an alternative to Wikipedia, the crowdsourced online encyclopedia. In this paper, we provide the first comprehensive analysis of Grokipedia and compare it to a dump of Wikipedia, with a focus on article similarity and citation practices. Although Grokipedia articles are much longer than their corresponding English Wikipedia articles, we find that much of Grokipedia’s content (including both articles with and without Creative Commons licenses) is highly derivative of Wikipedia. Nevertheless, citation practices between the sites differ greatly, with Grokipedia citing many more sources deemed “generally unreliable” or “blacklisted” by the English Wikipedia community and low quality by external scholars, including dozens of citations to sites like Stormfront and Infowars. We then analyze article subsets: one about elected officials, one about controversial topics, and one random subset for which we derive article quality and topic. We find that the elected official and controversial article subsets showed less similarity between their Wikipedia version and Grokipedia version than other pages. The random subset illustrates that Grokipedia focused rewriting the highest quality articles on Wikipedia, with a bias towards biographies, politics, society, and history. Finally, we publicly release our nearly-full scrape of Grokipedia, as well as embeddings of the entire Grokipedia corpus.

It’s an interesting paper which shows that much of Muskopedia Grokipedia is just scraped from Wikipedia but some articles have been rewritten to reflect Elon Musk’s fascist attitudes.

Incidentally, the name is derived from Grok, an AI bot for spreading far-right propaganda on Twitter. “Grot” would have been a better name. I have no experience of Grok as I no longer use Twitter and have no intention of looking at Grokipedia either. I imagine it’s probably like Conservapedia, although considerably less (unintentionally) funny.

I remember that I should have posted a reaction to the spineless behaviour of the Royal Society, of which Mr Musk is a Fellow. At the “Unite the Kingdom” march organized by career criminal and racist thug Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson), Elon Musk made a (remote) contributuion that used violent rhetoric to promote narratives of division and polarisation. This is what his sort will always do. The Royal Society’s response was to issue a lame public statement but take no further action. Musk’s continued presence is a terrible stain on the reputation of the Royal Society.

In the interest of full disclosure I should mention that I do have a Wikipedia page. I’m told I don’t get a mention on Muskopedia. I am grateful for that. Anyway, this paper reminded me to make another donation to Wikipedia. I encourage you to do likewise.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 15/11/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 15, 2025 by telescoper

It’s Saturday again, so it’s time for the usual update of the week’s new papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. It has been quite a busy week. Since the last update we have published another seven papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 175, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 410.

First on the menu for this week is “Dynamical friction and measurements of the splashback radius in galaxy clusters” by Talia M. O’Shea (U. Wisconsin-Madison, USA), Josh Borrow & Stephanie O’Neil (U. Pennsylvania, USA) and Mark Vogelsberger (MIT, USA). Published on Tuesday 11th November in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, this one presents a study suggesting that dynamical friction does not play a major role in reducing the radius of the splashback feature in real data compared to numerical simulations.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

The Fediverse announcement is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Dynamical friction and measurements of the splashback radius in galaxy clusters" by Talia M. O'Shea (U. Wisconsin-Madison, USA), Josh Borrow & Stephanie O'Neil (U. Pennsylvania, USA) and Mark Vogelsberger (MIT, USA)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.147125

November 11, 2025, 8:36 am 3 boosts 1 favorites

 

The second paper of the week is “Microlensing of lensed supernovae Zwicky & iPTF16geu: constraints on the lens galaxy mass slope and dark compact object fraction” by Nikki Arendse (Stockholm University, Sweden) and and international cast of 11 others based in Sweden, UK and France. This one was published on 11th November 2025 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It is about combining observations of two supernovae, iPTF16geu and SN Zwicky, with microlensing magnification maps to probe the properties of the lens galaxy.

The overlay is here:

 

You can find the official version of this one on arXiv here. The federated announcement on Mastodon is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Microlensing of lensed supernovae Zwicky & iPTF16geu: constraints on the lens galaxy mass slope and dark compact object fraction" by Nikki Arendse (Stockholm University, Sweden) and 11 others based in Sweden, UK and France

doi.org/10.33232/001c.147126

November 11, 2025, 8:53 am 1 boosts 1 favorites

 

Next one up is “Neutrino Constraints on Black Hole Formation in M31” by Yudai Sawa (U. Tokyo, Japan) and 11 others all based in Japan. This was published on Tuesday 11th November in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. It presents a calculation of the neutrino emission expected from the collapse of massive stars and its use in constraining black hole formation using neutrino detectors.

 

The overlay is here:

You can find the official accepted version on arXiv here. The fediverse announcement is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Neutrino Constraints on Black Hole Formation in M31" by Yudai Sawa (U. Tokyo, Japan) and 11 others all based in Japan

doi.org/10.33232/001c.147127

November 11, 2025, 9:04 am 0 boosts 1 favorites

The fourth paper this week is “Redshift Drift in Relativistic N-Body Simulations” by Alexander Oestreicher (U. Southern Denmark, DK), Chris Clarkson (QMUL, UK), Julian Adamek (U. Zürich, CH) and Sofie Marie Koksbang (U. Southern Denmark, DK). This one was published on Wednesday 12th November in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. It presents numerical calculations of the cosmological redshift drift effect for comparison with future surveys.

The overlay is here:

 

 

You can find the official published version on arXiv here. The Fediverse announcement follows:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Redshift Drift in Relativistic N-Body Simulations" by Alexander Oestreicher (U. Southern Denmark, DK), Chris Clarkson (QMUL, UK), Julian Adamek (U. Zürich, CH) and Sofie Marie Koksbang (U. Southern Denmark, DK)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.147178

November 12, 2025, 8:35 am 1 boosts 0 favorites

 

The fifth paper for this week is “Attributing the point symmetric structure of core-collapse supernova remnant N132D to the jittering jets explosion mechanism” by Noam Soker (Technion, Haifa, Israel). This one, published on Wednesday November 12th in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, presents a discussion of the morphology of a supernova remnant and possible explanation for it in terms of the explosion mechanism.

The overlay is here:

 

The officially accepted version can be found on arXiv here. The Fediverse announcement is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Attributing the point symmetric structure of core-collapse supernova remnant N132D to the jittering jets explosion mechanism" by Noam Soker (Technion, Haifa, Israel)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.147183

November 12, 2025, 8:46 am 1 boosts 0 favorites

The sixth paper to report this week is “Witnessing downsizing in the making: quiescent and breathing galaxies at the dawn of the Universe” by Emiliano Merlin (Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma, Italy) and an international cast of 20 others based in Italy, Germany, UK, USA, Switzerland, Spain and China. This one was published on Friday November 14th in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies.

You can find the officially-accepted version on arXiv here. The fediverse announcement is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Witnessing downsizing in the making: quiescent and breathing galaxies at the dawn of the Universe" by Emiliano Merlin (Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma, Italy) and 20 others based in Italy, Germany, UK, USA, Switzerland, Spain and China

doi.org/10.33232/001c.147267

November 14, 2025, 8:38 am 1 boosts 1 favorites

And finally (for this week) we have “Beyond No No Tension: JWST z > 10 Galaxies Push Simulations to the Limit” by Joe McCaffrey (NUI Maynooth, Ireland), Samantha Hardin & John Wise (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA) and John Regan (Maynooth). This one was also published on Friday 14th November, in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies. It asks the question whether newly-discovered high redshift galaxies are consistent with simulations of galaxy formation. The overlay is here:

You can find the officially acceopted version on arXiv here. The fediverse announcement is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Beyond No No Tension: JWST z > 10 Galaxies Push Simulations to the Limit" by Joe McCaffrey (NUI Maynooth, Ireland), Samantha Hardin & John Wise (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA) and John Regan (Maynooth)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.147278

November 14, 2025, 9:02 am 2 boosts 0 favorites

And that concludes the update for this week. There will be another next Saturday.

The Key to Ireland’s Victory against Portugal

Posted in Football with tags , , , , on November 14, 2025 by telescoper

After a run of disappointing results, Ireland’s footballers last night scored a memorable victory, beating  Portugal 2-0 in a World Cup Qualifying match. I attribute the result to the new Head Coach, pictured below…

And here is a photo of Ireland’s two-goal hero, Troy Parrot, in action.

Quantum & Answers

Posted in Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on November 13, 2025 by telescoper

Returning to my office in the Science Building at Maynooth University I saw a new feature, which I initially thought was a mobile coffee shop, but which turned out to be the Quantum & Answers trailer, a mobile engagement unit, developed by IrelandQCI, and designed to bring quantum technologies to life for the general public in Ireland.

In case you weren’t aware, IrelandQCI, the ‘Building a National Quantum Communication Infrastructure for Ireland’ project incorporates integrating innovative and secure quantum devices and systems into conventional communication infrastructures. This will be done by enhancing the ESB Telecoms’ optical fibre network with an additional layer of security, all based on quantum physics, in particular quantum key distribution (QKD).

You can read more about this initiative here.

It’s on Maynooth University campus for the rest of the day so if you’re around please feel free to visit and talk about quantum encryption and the like.

Update: I popped in to get out of the rain…