In the Dark

It’s time once again for me to announce the publication of another paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. The new paper, published last week, is the 14th paper in Volume 5 (2022) and the 62nd in all. The latest publication is entitled “Gravitational Stability of Vortices in Bose-Einstein Condensate Dark Matter”. This paper is another one for the folder marked Cosmology and Non-Galactic Astrophysics and the authors are Mark N Brook Now at the Institute for Cancer Research in London) and Peter Coles (Who he? Ed).

There is a bit of a story behind this one. The work on which this paper is based was done while both authors (Mark and I) were at the University of Nottingham. Mark was my PhD student at the time.  I left Nottingham for Cardiff in 2007 but Mark stayed behind to finish his thesis and write this paper, which appeared on the arXiv in 2009. The paper wasn’t accepted in its original form, Mark left the field after obtaining his PhD, and I was working on other things at Cardiff so the paper remained unpublished on the arXiv.

Last year, however, I was updating my publication list and noticed the old preprint so looked it up on NASA/ADS. Although not Earth-shattering, I found it had been acquiring a reasonable number of citations (16 according to ADS, including some this year) as an unpublished work largely because of increased interest in the field of condensate dark matter. I therefore approached the Editorial Board of the Open Journal of Astrophysics to ask their opinion about whether it would be appropriate to consider it for publication. They agreed and the paper was assigned to an Editor. Obviously I recused myself from the process.

Somewhat to my surprise, given that it’s basically an old paper, the referee comments were supportive. I’ve been very busy for the past year and communication with Mark was slow so it’s taken a while to revise and update the paper in line with the referee requests. We also took the opportunity to include a brief review of some papers that had come out since the original version of the paper appeared. Mark and I agreed a final text l and the paper was accepted last week. I uploaded the agreed version to arXiv and now the paper is now published. It was all a bit unconventional but there we are. It was interesting to be on the author side of the process for a change!

Anyway, here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the  abstract:

You can click on the image to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.