Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics 02/10/2026
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 13 papers, including one correction to an article already published, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 229 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 677. This would have been a busy week even without the clutch of four MEGATRON papers announced on Wednesday!
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, including posts from the OJAp blog.
The first new paper this week was published on Tuesday 28th September in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. The title is “Phlegethon: a fully compressible magnetohydrodynamic code for simulations in stellar astrophysics” and it is by G. Leidi (Heidelberger Institut für Theoretische Studie, Germany) and 14 others. PHLEGETHON is a magnetohydrodynamic code designed for multidimensional simulations in stellar astrophysics, capable of modeling a wide range of dynamical processes in stars. It is publicly accessible online.
The overlay for this one is here:
You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:
The second paper for this week, published on Tuesday 29th September, is “The impact of source and survey modelling on the connection between [O III] emitters and Ly-α forest transmission at z ~ 6” by Luke Conaboy (U. Nottingham, UK) and 5 others based in the UK, India and Germany. This study improves theoretical work on the connection between galaxies and the intergalactic medium, using an empirical model and James Webb Space Telescope surveys. It is in the folder marked Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics.
The overlay looks like this:
The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
Next we have four related papers produced by the MEGATRON Project, led by Harley Katz (U. Chicago) and Martin Rey (U. Bath, UK), Corentin Cadiou (IAP Paris, France). These were all published on Wednesday 30th September in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies.
I mentioned this in a separate blog post here, so I won’t describe them in detail again here. Here are the four overlays:
The Mastodon announcement for these is in the form of a thread:
The four papers can be found on arXiv here, here, here and here.
The four MEGATRON papers were not the only ones published on Wednesday 30th September, however. We published “The Chirp-Mass Ladder: A New Rung Emerges” by Vaibhav Tiwari (U. Birmingham, UK) in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena on that day too. This paper presents an analysis of 256 binary black-hole (BBH) events, suggesting a hierarchical merger scenario to explain the structured mass distribution, and encouraging further investigation into hierarchical mergers’ role in the BBH population. The overlay for this is here:
The accepted version of this one can be found on the arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:
The eighth new paper of the week, published on Thursday 1st October 2026, in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, is “A Consistent Implementation of Cluster Strong Lensing in Cosmological Simulation Light Cones” by Cian Roche (MIT, USA) and 11 others based in the USA, Germany and Italy.
The overlay is here:
The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
We now have four papers all published on Friday 2nd October (i.e. yesterday).
The first of this batch is “Analytical weak-lensing shear response of galaxy model fitting” by Xiangchong Li (Brookhaven National Laboratory, USA). This is in the folder marked Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics: it explores how galaxy model fitting responds to weak-lensing shear distortions using a new algebraic system, quintuple numbers, within the AnaCal framework, keeping multiplicative bias low.
The overlay is here:
The officially-accepted version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
The 10th paper of the week is “Evidence for inefficient dust production in a massive, metal-rich galaxy at z=7.13 uncovered by JWST and ALMA” by Kasper E. Heintz (Cosmic Dawn Center, Copenhagen, Denmark) and 19 others in Europe, UK and USA. This article, published on Friday 2nd October 2026, in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, analyzes cosmic dust in high redshift galaxies, specifically A1689-zD1, using data from JWST and ALMA, suggesting dust formation and destruction processes differ for galaxies in the early Universe.
The officially-accepted version of this paper is on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement on the fediverse here:
The 11th paper of the week is “Starbursts hiding in the main sequence: a pathway toward quenching?” by Florent Renaud (Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg, France) and 12 others based in France and UK. This article explores the “starbursts in the main sequence” (SBMSs) that intermittently appear in galaxy evolution, attributing their existence to earlier stellar mass assembly and frequent mergers. It was published on Friday 2nd October 2026, in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies.
The overlay is here:
The officially accepted version is on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:
The twelfth, and last, of the new papers for this week is “Ring Position Angles and Spin in M87* and Sgr A*” by Nicholas S. Conroy (U. Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA) and 6 others all based in the USA. This was also published on Friday 2nd October but in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena.
The overlay is here:
The final version of this paper is on the arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:
And finally, on Monday 28th September we announced one (minor) correction to a previously published article. The overlay of the correction notice is here:
The mastodon announcement is here:
The corrected version of this paper can be found on arXiv here.
That concludes this week’s update. As things are going we seem likely to publish over 300 papers this year, and may reach the 750 mark by the end of the year too. I’ll do another update next week.
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