Archive for Mateja Gosenca

10 Years of the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth, OJAp Papers, Open Access with tags , , on February 8, 2026 by telescoper

The visit of my former PhD student Mateja Gosenca to Maynooth last year reminded me that she was co-author of the very first paper published by the Open Journal of Astrophysics. The date of publication for that paper was 8th February 2016, i.e. excactly10 years ago today.

Here is the overlay:

In those days OJAp was very much an experiment, and we used a protoptype platform which I had paid a developer to set up but it never really progressed beyond a “beta” version owing to stability and other issues. I was a Head of School at Sussex then and had very little time to work on the project and it stalled. I came to Maynooth in late 2017 and discussed the idea of OJAp with staff at the Library who were enthusiastic about it. We abandoned the prototype and switched to the Scholastica platform, imported the papers we had previously published into the new site and restarted. It was slow going at first and then we had the Covid-19 lockdown tand I had to conted with a workload that went through the roof. Several times I thought it was never going to take off and wondered about closing it to new submissions. With a bit of pig-headed obstinacy and a refusal to look facts in the face, however, we carried on.

The journal has grown steadily since the end of the pandemuic: from just 17 papers in 2022, 50 in 2023, 120 in 2024, to 213 last year (including our first Supplement). I expect we’ll publish over 250 this year. I think a large part of the growth has been due to the decision of the Royal Astronomical Society to adopt a pay-to-publish model. I expected it to take a while to establish a reputation, but perhaps not as long as it did. We’re still quite small compared to other journals, but I’m pleased with the progress. I think in the long run the slow start helped, as it gave us more time to iron out various issues and recruit more editors.

This brings me to the fact that I will be retiring in a couple of years, if not sooner, and someone else will have to take over as Editor-in-Chief when that happens. At present, OJAp is published by Maynooth Academic Publishing and it’s not obvious that arrangement can continue when I am no longer employed at Maynooth. It would not be technically difficult to transfer everything to a new owner, but the handover would have to be planned to avoid disruption.

P.S. As I mentioned last month, we are always on the lookout for new Editors. Please contact me if you’re interesed!

Leave a comment »

Cosmology Talks: Mateja Gosença & Bodo Schwabe on Simulating Mixed Fuzzy and Cold Dark Matter

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , on November 11, 2020 by telescoper

It’s been too long since I shared one of those interesting cosmology talks on the Youtube channel curated by Shaun Hotchkiss. This channel features technical talks rather than popular expositions so it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea but for those seriously interested in cosmology at a research level they should prove interesting.

Anyway, although I’ve been too busy to check out the talks much recently I couldn’t resist sharing this one not only because it’s on a topic I find interesting (and have worked on) but also because one of the presenters (Mateja Gosença) is a former PhD student of mine from Sussex! So before I go fully into proud supervisor mode, I’ll just say that the talk is about AxioNyx, which is a new public code for simulating both ultralight (or “Fuzzy”, so called because its Compton de Broglie wavelength is large enough to be astrophysically relevant) dark matter (FDM) and Cold dark matter (CDM) simultaneously. The code simulates the FDM using adaptive mesh refinement and the CDM using N-body particles.

P. S. The paper that accompanies this talk can be found on the arXiv here.

6 Comments »

A First Author Paper

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on February 16, 2015 by telescoper

I thought I’d take a few minutes to celebrate the fact that the first first-author paper by my PhD student here at the University of Sussex, Mateja Gosenca, has just hit the arXiv. The abstract reads:

We explore the dynamical behaviour of cosmological models involving a scalar field (with an exponential potential and a canonical kinetic term) and a matter fluid with spatial curvature included in the equations of motion. Using appropriately defined parameters to describe the evolution of the scalar field energy in this situation, we find that there are two extra fixed points that are not present in the case without curvature. We also analyse the evolution of the effective equation-of-state parameter for different initial values of the curvature.

There has been a lot of interest recently in treating cosmological models as dynamical systems, and the class of models we studied has been analysed before (see the references in the paper) but this paper addresses them in a different (and perhaps slightly more elegant) way and in the context of quintessence models for dark energy. It also contains some very pretty multi-dimensional phase portraits, like this:

Mateja

Of course these figures are self-explanatory, so I’ll say no more about them…

6 Comments »