It’s time for another Saturday 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 259 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 707.
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.
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Selection effects in correlated observations with application to distance-ladder observations" by Will J. Percival (U. Waterloo, Canada)
The second paper for this week, published on Wednesday 4th November in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “Effects of Resolution and Local Stability on Galactic Disks: I. Multiple Spiral Mode Formation via Swing Amplification” by SungWon Kwak, Ivan Minchev, Christoph Pfrommer & Matthias Steinmetz (Leibniz-Institüt für Astrophysik Potsdam, Germany) and Sukyoung K. Yi (Yonsei U., Republic of Korea). This article presents a theoretical study of the formation of spiral modes in Milky Way type galaxies, showing that a simulated halo with appropriate mass resolution can sustain multi-mode spiral structure.
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: "Effects of Resolution and Local Stability on Galactic Disks: I. Multiple Spiral Mode Formation via Swing Amplification" by SungWon Kwak, Ivan Minchev, Christoph Pfrommer & Matthias Steinmetz (Leibniz-Institüt für Astrophysik Potsdam, Germany) and Sukyoung K. Yi (Yonsei U., Republic of Korea).
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Clustering redshift distribution calibration of weak lensing surveys using the DESI-DR1 spectroscopic dataset" by R. Ruggeri (Queensland U. Tech, Australia) and 64 others distributed around the world.
That concludes this week’s update. It has been a slower week than average, but we have plenty of papers in the pipeline and I’m still hopeful that we will reach a total of 300 papers this year.
I thought you might like to hear a recording of piece I heard a couple of weeks ago at the National Concert Hall in Dublin. This is Laniakea by French composer Camille Pépin which is inspired by our Local Supercluster of galaxies which astronomers have named Laniakea, an Hawaiian word meaning “immeasurable heaven”. Stylistically the music reminds me a lot of John Adams, and I don’t mean that in a negative way!
Yesterday I was reading the weekend edition of the Irish Times and came across this article:
It was only afterwards that the name of the author, Hagai El-Ad rang a bell. When I did a search for his name I found his wikipedia page that describes him as an “Israeli LGBT and human rights activist”. When I read further I remembered that I met him years ago at a conference in Casablanca, called From Quantum Fluctuations to Cosmic Structures, when he was a budding physics student with an interest in cosmology, especially in cosmic voids. I was alarmed to realize that conference was in 1996! How can it have been 30 years ago? Hagai El-Ad subsequently co-wrote a paper on the subject of cosmic voids.
I guess he gave up the cosmology to concentrate on more pressing matters, but this goes to show it is a small world (but a big Universe).
It’s time for another Saturday 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 256 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 704.
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.
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "On the relation between magnetic field strength and gas density in the interstellar medium. II. Density uncertainties and diffuse gas constraints" by David Whitworth (ENS Lyon, France) and 6 others based in Austrailia, Canada, USA, Austria, Mexico and Germany.
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "The Lifecycle and Emission Properties of PAHs in Cosmological Hydrodynamic Galaxy Formation Simulations" by Desika Narayanan (U. Florida, USA) and 18 others.
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "HII-CHI-mistry for active galactic nuclei: optical sulphur abundances without empirical ionisation correction factors" by Enrique Pérez-Montero (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain) and 5 others.
The fourth article of the week, also published on Wednesday 28th October but in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, is “How Common Are Common Envelopes? Quantifying Their Role in Forming Gravitational-Wave Sources” by Floor Broekgaarden (University of California San Diego, USA) and 16 others. This work involves a compilation and systematically comparison of formation-channel predictions from more than 200 isolated-binary population-synthesis simulations, organized within a unified hierarchical system identify the frequency of common-envelope evolution.
The overlay is here:
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: "How Common Are Common Envelopes? Quantifying Their Role in Forming Gravitational-Wave Sources" by Floor Broekgaarden (University of California San Diego, USA) and 16 others.
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "From ASTRID to BRAHMA – The role of overmassive black holes in little red dots in cosmological simulations" by Patrick LaChance (Carnegie Mellon U., USA) and 10 others (all based in the USA).
The penultimate, sixth, paper this week is “No Blue without Red: Evolutionary Properties of Super-Early Galaxies” by A. Ferrara (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy) and 5 others based in Italy and China. This was also published on Friday 30th October in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. This paper presents an interpretive scheme for the properties of extremely early galaxies highlighting the key role of radiation-driven outflows and indicating how JWST/ALMA observations will provide key tests.
The overlay is here:
You can find the final version of this paper on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "No Blue without Red: Evolutionary Properties of Super-Early Galaxies" by A. Ferrara (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy) and 5 others based in Italy and China
The seventh and last paper to report this week is “Automatic astrometric calibration of low-cost all-sky cameras” by J. R. González Fernández (Universidad Internacional de La Rioja, Spain), Laura Hermosa Muñoz (Universidad de Oviedo, Spain) and María Fernández Alonso & Lucía González Cuesta (Allande Stars, Spain). This was published on Friday 30th October in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. This paper describes an open-source procedure for astrometric calibration that combines a compact fisheye model, an exact rotation to account for camera tilt, and automatic star matching.
The overlay for this one is here:
The officially accepted version is on arXiv here and this is the Mastodon announcement:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: Automatic astrometric calibration of low-cost all-sky cameras" by J. R. González Fernández (Universidad Internacional de La Rioja, Spain), Laura Hermosa Muñoz (Universidad de Oviedo, Spain) and María Fernández Alonso & Lucía González Cuesta (Allande Stars, Spain)
That concludes this week’s update. There was an interruption in publishing on Thursday 29th October as arXiv did not update on that day owing to its migration into the cloud. Anyway, we have now published over 700 papers in total. So far this year we have published 256, with 10 of the 12 months now complete. A rough estimate would take us to about 307 by the end of the year. We have in fact published more than 300 papers since this time last year. I’ll do another update next week.
Today being the last Monday of October, it’s a Bank Holiday here in Ireland – Lá Saoire i Mí Dheireadh Fómhair (literally, the Holiday at the End of the Month of October) so I had the morning off; I have a telecon this afternoon. This week is Study Week too so there are no lectures or tutorials until next Monday, when we resume for the seven remaing weeks of the Semester.
I’ll be travelling tomorrow to give a seminar at Queen’s University Belfast. My talk will have the title Open Access Publishing in Astrophysics and the Open Journal of Astrophysics, an updated version of a talk I’ve given in a number of places. over the past few years. I was looking at NASA/ADS just now to get the latest statistics and discovered that articles in the Open Journal of Astrophysics have now received over 10,000 citations at an average of 14.9 per paper. The average has been consistent since the first few years of publishing, which is interesting for the reason that our publishing rate is rising steadily so that most of our publications are very recent.
Anyway, I’m quite looking forward to the trip. The worst of the awful weather of the past few days seems to have passed and I hope I can make it to and from Belfast by train without the intervention of floods or fallen trees.
Another name for the present Bank Holiday is Lá Saoire Oíche Shamhna (Halloween Holiday), although Halloween itself does not occur until Saturday. I’ll be travelling again at the weekend, but this time purely for pleasure.
At this time of year many of the buildings of the historic South Campus are ablaze with Red Virginia Creeper:
It’s time for another Saturday update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further four papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 249 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 697.
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 paper this week was published on Tuesday 20th October in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The title is “The Metallicity Distribution of the Ultra-Faint Dwarf Galaxy Segue 1” by Daisy Bissonette (U. Chicago, USA) and 8 others based in the USA, Australia and Canada. The article explains that new data on the metallicity of ultra-faint dwarf galaxy Segue 1 reveal a continuous, short-duration episode of star formation and chemical enrichment, confirming its classification as a galaxy.
The overlay for this one 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: "The Metallicity Distribution of the Ultra-Faint Dwarf Galaxy Segue 1" by Daisy Bissonette (U. Chicago, USA) and 8 others based in the USA, Australia and Canada.
The second paper for this week, also published on Tuesday 20th October in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, “Ultraviolet diversity of Little Red Dots as a probe for direct-collapse black hole ages” by Elia Cenci & Melanie Habouzit (U. Geneva, Switzerland) and Dale D. Kocevski (Colby College, USA). This article uses simulations to explore UV emissions from galaxies hosting direct-collapse black holes (DCBHs), finding that these emissions evolve rapidly, reflecting changes in stellar mass and metal enrichment.
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: "Ultraviolet diversity of Little Red Dots as a probe for direct-collapse black hole ages" by Elia Cenci & Melanie Habouzit (U. Geneva, Switzerland) and Dale D. Kocevski (Colby College, USA)
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Dark Energy Survey Year 6 Results: improved mitigation of spatially varying observational systematics with masking for the MagLim++ lens sample" by M. Rodríguez-Monroy (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain) and 65 others from around the world.
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Spectroscopic Binary Detection as Agent-Callable Tools: Detecting 40,000+ Main-Sequence Binary Candidates from SDSS DR19 APOGEE Spectra" by Serat Mahmud Saad and Yuan-Sen Ting (Ohio State University, USA).
That concludes this week’s update. I had anticipated that we’ll pass the 250 mark this week, but business has been slower than of late so we’ll have to wait until next week for that. It is noticeable that the arXiv submission process is slower now than it used to be, presumably because of the huge influx of AI slop that the moderators have to deal with.
The European Space Agency’s Euclid Mission is mapping the distribution of galaxies on large scales with the intention of finding out about the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Making such maps involves surveying large areas of the sky for a very long time and doing that makes it inevitable that something unexpected will crop up. That happened last month, between 16th and 24th September 2026, when the Euclid telescope accidentally discovered a comet.
Here is an image showing what Euclid was looking at when the comet intruded:
Here is is a comparison of frames showing the motion of the comet, which is easily identifiable by the large arrow pointing at it together with the word “comet”.
Picture Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, M. Pöntinen et al. 2026
The serendipitous comet is named C/2026 S1 (Euclid) – and, before you ask, no it’s not an alien spacecraft.
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 eight papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 245 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 693. There was no arXiv update on Monday 12th October owing to a US holiday, and I was on strike on Wednesday 14th October, so there were no papers published on either 13th or 14th October.
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.
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Search for Gamma-ray emission from Abell 119 galaxy cluster using INTEGRAL/ISGRI, COMPTEL, and DAMPE data" by Siddhant Manna & Shantanu Desai (IIT Hyderabad Kandi, India)
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Fast Astronomical Transients in Archival Photographic Plates: Using optical aberrations as a tool for discerning real images, from plate artifacts" by Ivo Busko (Independent Researcher)
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics "Differentiable Optics with dLux II: Optical Design Maximising Fisher Information" by Louis Desdoigts (Leiden Obs., NL), Benjamin Pope (Macquarie U., AU), Michael Gully-Santiago (U. Texas Austin, USA) & Peter Tuthill (U. Sydney, AU)
The fourth new article of the week, also published on Thursday 15th October, in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies is “The Lumina Project: Intergalactic Clumping and Recombination Sinks” by Ali Sadain (U. Texas Dallas, USA) and 12 others based in the USA, S. Korea and Germany. The study uses simulations to examine the uneven recombination rates during the Epoch of Reionization, finding a universal clumping evolution and discrepancies in recombination rates due to photoheating.
The overlay is here:
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: "The Lumina Project: Intergalactic Clumping and Recombination Sinks" by Ali Sadain (U. Texas Dallas, USA) and 12 others based in the USA, S. Korea and Germany.
Paper Number Five for the week is “Blast.jl: Differentiable Non-Limber Power Spectra for Joint Clustering, Shear, and CMB lensing Analyses” by Sofia Chiarenza (U. Waterloo, Canada) and 6 others based in Canada, Italy, France and USA. This study, which is in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, presents an enhanced version of Blast.jl, a toolkit for computing non-Limber angular power spectra, incorporating various cosmological effects. Despite increased complexity, it maintains efficiency and supports gradient-based inference. It was also published on Thursday 15th October.
The overlay is here:
The officially-accepted version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Blast.jl: Differentiable Non-Limber Power Spectra for Joint Clustering, Shear, and CMB lensing Analyses" by Sofia Chiarenza (U. Waterloo, Canada) and 6 others based in Canada, Italy, France and USA.
Sixth one up is “EMU detection of mysterious multiple component radio-continuum emission from nearby spiral Seyfert I type galaxy ‘Sand-timer’ (NGC 7213)” by Miroslav Filipović (Western Sydney U., Australia) and an international cast of 26 others. The observations presented in this paper reveal peculiar emissions and previously undetected features in the ‘Sand-timer’ galaxy NGC 7213, possibly due to black hole activity or a tidal disruption event.
The overlay is here:
The officially-accepted version of this paper is on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement on the fediverse here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Blast.jl: Differentiable Non-Limber Power Spectra for Joint Clustering, Shear, and CMB lensing Analyses" by Sofia Chiarenza (U. Waterloo, Canada) and 6 others based in Canada, Italy, France and USA.
The seventh paper of the week is “pynucastro 3: A community library for nuclear astrophysics” by Zhi Chen (Stony Brook U., USA) and 10 others, all based in the USA. This was published on Friday 16th October, i.e. yesterday, in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. This article announces the latest release of pynucastro, a python library for nuclear astrophysics, includes new rate approximations, a stellar equation of state, StarLib support, and network exploration tools.
The overlay is here:
The officially accepted version is on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "pynucastro 3: A community library for nuclear astrophysics" by Zhi Chen (Stony Brook U., USA) and 10 others, all based in the USA.
The eighth, and last, of the new papers for this week is “A Deep Look at the Ultra-Faint Milky Way Satellite Virgo III with Rubin Observatory Data Preview 2” by Aashay Pai (U. Chicago, USA) and 12 others based in the USA. This study uses data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory to analyze the ultra-faint Milky Way satellite, Virgo III, confirming Virgo III’s properties as an ultra-faint dwarf galaxy.
The overlay is here:
The final version of this paper is on the arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "A Deep Look at the Ultra-Faint Milky Way Satellite Virgo III with Rubin Observatory Data Preview 2" by Aashay Pai (U. Chicago, USA) and 12 others based in the USA.
That concludes this week’s update. I anticipate that we’ll pass the 250 mark for 2026 next week, which means we’re well on target to publish over 300 papers and reach the 750 mark by the end of the year. I’ll do another update next weekend.
I’ve been remiss in not passing on significant news that involves former colleagues at Cardiff University and Sussex University, so I thought I would remedy that lapse today. A few weeks ago it was announced that NASA has selected a far-infrared space telescope called PRIMA as the first in a new series of missions to be launched around 2033. The mission now enters a Phase B study.
In a nutshell, PRIMA (PRobe far-Infrared Mission for Astrophysics) is a far-infrared observatory based around a 1.8-m diameter telescope, cryogenically-cooled (to 4.5 K). It includes both a sensitive wideband spectrometer FIRESS, and a multi-band spectrophotometric imager /polarimeter PRIMAger. PRIMA’s sensitivity unlocks the potential of the far-IR waveband to advance astrophysics across a broad range of topics spanning from galaxy and dust evolution in the early universe to the formation of planets and planetary atmospheres. FIRESS offers full-band instantaneous coverage from 24 to 235 μm in two modes. The low-res mode offers R~100 with long slits, while the high-resolution mode offers R up to 4,400 × (112 μm / λ) in smaller fields. PRIMAger offers rapid R=8 hyperspectral imaging with continuous coverage from 25 to 84 μm, and imaging polarimetry in 4 bands from 90 to 235 μm.
Although a NASA mission, several UK institutions are involved in PRIMA: Cardiff University, Imperial College London, the University of Sussex, and RAL Space. Cardiff University’s involvement is primarily (geddit?) in instrument development (see here) and former colleague at Sussex, Seb Oliver, will lead the UK’s overall contribution.
I wish everyone involved all the best for the planning, development and future operation of this mission. I will of course be long retired before it is launched!
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