Last week I posted a photograph taken during my public lecture at Maynooth University. I thought I’d compound your collective misery by putting up more. I’m not sharing any pics of the audience because we didn’t ask them for permission, so you’re basically stuck with pictures of me (and one of Joost Slingerland, our Head of Department, in the first one).
Thanks to Dale for taking the pictures!
I am happy to announce the publication of yet another new paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This one is hot off the press; it was published today, 11th September 2023.
The latest paper is in fact our 100th publication. It is also the 35th in Volume 6 (2023), which means that we have now published more papers so far this year than in the previous two years put together. I’d like to thank everyone who has supported the Open Journal of Astrophysics and helped us get this far! Here’s to the next 100!
Anyway, the new paper is entitled A complete catalogue of merger fractions in AGN hosts: No evidence for an increase in detected merger fraction with AGN luminosity and it is a complete and systematic analysis of detected merger fractions in AGN hosts from the literature leading to the conclusion that there is no evidence for correlation between the two.
The primary classification for this paper is Astrophysics of Galaxies and the author is Carolin Villforth of the Department of Physics in the University of Bath. As author of our 100th paper, Carolin wins a year’s free subscription to the Open Journal of Astrophysics.
Here is a screen grab of the overlay of the published version which includes the abstract:
You can click on the image of the overlay to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.
Incidentally, you might notice a new feature on the overlay above. Just above the Abstract heading on the right and side you can see a little link saying “Download”. This allows you to download the citation to the paper in BibTex format.
One of the things that happened last week while I was preoccupied with ITP2023 is that, finally, the UK Government has decided to re-join the European Union’s Horizon 2020 project. I’m very happy about this, and can’t understand why it has taken so long to reach an agreement. I know many researchers in the UK who will be mightily relieved too. Of course things won’t immediately get back to normal. It’s not just that the UK contributions will start in January 2024 so there will have to be some sort of transitional arrangement. More importantly it remains to be seen how long it takes to repair the damage done to goodwill by all the political shenanigans.
While I’m on about research I should also mention that there was a short talk at ITP2023 by a particle physicist by the name of Ronan McNulty who is based at University College Dublin. The topic of that talk was the history of Ireland’s non-membership of CERN; I have blogged about this before, for example here. Currently Ireland is in the anomalous position of not having any form of association agreement with CERN; the list of Full and Associate Member states can be found here. It does seem, however, that Ireland is at last about to lodge an application for Associate Membership, perhaps as early as January 2024.
Ronan made a particularly important point about membership, which I hope is not sidelined in the discussions. The case for joining CERN made at political levels is largely about the return in terms of the potential in contracts to technology companies based in Ireland from instrumentation and other infrastructure investments. This was also the case for Ireland’s membership of the European Southern Observatory, which Ireland joined about five years ago. The same thing is true for involvement in the European Space Agency, which Ireland joined in 1975. These benefits are of course real and valuable and it is entirely right that arguments should involve them.
Looking at CERN membership from a scientific point of view, however, the return to Ireland will be negligible unless there is a funding to support scientific exploitation of the facility. That would include funding for academic staff time, and for postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers to build up an active community as well as, e.g., computing facilities. This need not be expensive even relative to the modest cost of associate membership (approximately €1.5M). I would estimate a figure of around half that would be needed to support CERN-based science.
The problem is that research funding for fundamental science (such as particle physics) in Ireland is so limited as to be virtually non-existent by a matter of policy at Science Foundation Ireland, which basically only funds applied research. Even if it were decided to target funding for CERN exploitation, unless there is extra funding that would just lead to the jam being spread even more thinly elsewhere.
As I have mentioned before, Ireland’s membership of ESO provides a cautionary tale. The Irish astronomical community was very happy about the decision to join ESO, but it was not accompanied by significant funding to exploit the telescopes. Few astronomers have therefore been able to benefit from ESO membership. While there are other benefits of course, the return to science has been extremely limited. The phrase “to spoil a ship for a ha’porth of tar” springs to mind.
Although Ireland joined ESA almost fifty years ago, the same issue applies there. ESA member countries pay into a mandatory science programme which includes, for example, Euclid. However, did not put any resources on the table to allow full participation in the Euclid Consortium. There is Irish involvement in other ESA projects (such as JWST) but this is somewhat piecemeal. There is no funding programme in Ireland dedicated to the scientific exploitation of ESA projects.
Under current arrangements the best bet in Ireland for funding for ESA, ESO or CERN exploitation is via the European Research Council but to get a grant from that one has to compete with much better developed communities in those areas.
A significant shake-up of research funding in Ireland is in view, with Science Foundation Ireland and the Irish Research Council set to merge into a single entity. If I had any say in the new structure I would set up a pot of money specifically for the purposes I’ve described above. Funding applications would have to be competitive, of course, and I would argue for a panel with significant international representation to make the decisions. But for this to work the overall level of public sector research funding will have to increase dramatically from its current level, well below the OECD average. Ireland is currently running a huge Government surplus which is projected to continue growing until at least 2026.
Only a small fraction of that surplus would be needed to build viable research communities not only in fundamental science but also across a much wider range of disciplines. Failure to invest now would be a wasted opportunity.
This morning found me in Renehan Hall in St Patrick’s House in Maynooth for ‘DonalFest’, a meeting to mark the retirement of former colleague (now Emeritus) Professor Brian P. Dolan, who retired a couple of years ago in the midst of the pandemic, which delayed his leaving do.
Today’s meeting involved a number of talks given by Brian’s past and present collaborators in the splendid surroundings of the old college (and, I might add, in glorious weather). Unfortunately I had to leave before the end in order to attend to some logistical matters to do with my impending departure on sabbatical, but I’m sure the rest of it was as enjoyable as the bit I was able to be at.
All of which gives me an excuse to plug again this textbook (left), based on the lecture notes Brian used to teach a final-year undergraduate course in General Relativity to Mathematical Physics students here in Maynooth.
The book’s description reads:
Einstein’s general theory of relativity can be a notoriously difficult subject for students approaching it for the first time, with arcane mathematical concepts such as connection coefficients and tensors adorned with a forest of indices. This book is an elementary introduction to Einstein’s theory and the physics of curved space-times that avoids these complications as much as possible. Its first half describes the physics of black holes, gravitational waves and the expanding Universe, without using tensors. Only in the second half are Einstein’s field equations derived and used to explain the dynamical evolution of the early Universe and the creation of the first elements. Each chapter concludes with problem sets and technical mathematical details are given in the appendices. This short text is intended for undergraduate physics students who have taken courses in special relativity and advanced mechanics.
You can order the book and/or recommend a copy to your library here.
Anyway, let me end with some personal wishes to Brian for a long and happy retirement!
Our roaming photographer took some pictures during my public talk on Wednesday night. This one seems ripe for a caption competition. Please submit your entries through the comments box below:
So here we are then, first day of the 2023 Irish Theoretical Physics meeting here in Maynooth. It’s a busy schedule for the three days, followed by a little meeting on Saturday to mark the retirement of Brian Dolan
It’s been a busy day for reasons other than the ITP2023 and I’ve left it a bit late to write my talk for this evening’s public lecture so I’d better get on with that this afternoon.
Updates to follow.
As part of effort to bring about closer interactions between members of the Departments of Theoretical Physics and Experimental Physics at MaynoothUniversity, we have formed a Centre for Astrophysics and Space Science which now has its own web pages.
The members of CASM have been meeting regularly together for coffee on Tuesdays for over a year, during which time more people have joined the Centre.
Today being a nice day we decided to make a team photograph showing staff, postgrads, and postdocs split roughly evenly between the two Departments. There’s also an undergraduate who has been working with us through the summer and helped to set up the web pages.
Not everyone was able to be there this morning, but it’s lovely to see the group as big as this. I think it will be even bigger when I get back from my sabbatical next year…
Not unexpectedly because of holidays, August has been rather a quiet month at the Open Journal of Astrophysics, but with people returning to work this week business has picked up again and it’s time to announce the last batch (all published this week).
In fact, this week we have published three papers, which I now present to you here. These take the count in Volume 6 (2023) up to 34 and the total published by OJAp up to 99. Who will be the author(s) of the 100th? We will just have to wait and see! I’ll do a special post for whichever paper wins that honour.
In chronological order, the three papers published this week, with their overlays, are as follows. You can click on the images of the overlays to make them larger should you wish to do so.
First one up is “Bright common envelope evolution requires jets” by Noam Soker of Technion, Haifa in Israel. This is a discussion of the role of jets that a main sequence secondary star launches as it enters a common envelope evolution (CEE) with a primary giant star. The paper was published on 28th August, is just the fifth item in the folder marked Solar and Stellar Astrophysics and can be found here.
Here is a screen grab of the overlay, which includes the abstract:
You can find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.
The second paper to announce is “Almanac: MCMC-based signal extraction of power spectra and maps on the sphere” by Elena Sellentin (Leiden), Arthur Loureiro (Stockholm); Lorne Whiteway (UCL); Javier Lafaurie (Leiden); Sreekumar Balan (UCL); Malak Olamaie (York); and Andrew Jaffe & Alan Heavens (Imperial). This presents a new software tool called Almanac , which uses Hamiltonian Monte Carlo sampling to infer the underlying all-sky noiseless maps of cosmic structures, together with their auto- and cross-power spectra.
This one is in the folder marked Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. The paper was also published on 28th August 2023 and you can see the overlay here:
The accepted version of this paper can be found on the arXiv here.
The last paper of this batch paper is in the Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics folder. It is entitled “Neural Network Based Point Spread Function Deconvolution For Astronomical Applications” and the authors are: Hong Wang, Sreevarsha Sreejith, Yuewin, Nesar Ramachandra*, Anze Slosar & Shinjae Yoo, all of the Brookhaven National Laboratory (NY) except * who is at the Argonne National Laboratory (IL), all based in the USA. This paper discusses a neural-network based deconvolution algorithm based on Deep Wiener Deconvolution Network (DWDN) and its performance in an astronomical context.
Here is the overlay:
You can find the full text for this one on the arXiv here.
I mentioned last week that I attended a public lecture by journalist Seán Mac an tSíthigh called Celestial Echoes: the Night Sky in Irish folklore. The talk was largely about some of the names given to celestial objects and the stories attached to those names. Much of the material was drawn from an extensive National Folklore Collection held at University College, Dublin. Unfortunately, however, the index to this collection is not very good at names for stars and constellations. In some cases it isn’t obvious what those names that are recorded actually refer to and in some cases the words themselves are obscure. The lecturer stressed that many of these words would have been known by the parents or grandparents of people in the audience, but have since been lost. There’s an article here that makes a similar point in a wider context. One prominent source of folklore, for example, is the traditional style of mackerel fishing, done at night so that the phosphorescence produced by the fish could be seen, which basically no longer exists so the folk names of stars and constellations used by the fishermen for navigation have been forgotten. Some other names have obviously been influenced by the Greco-Roman constellation names, etc.
I didn’t take many notes during this very enjoyable talk, but I did jot down a few words and phrases that I thought I’d pass on here. Given that my knowledge of modern Irish is very limited and many of the words used are dialect or archaic words that you won’t find in dictionaries, I’ll restrict myself to just a few of the things that caught my ear. Many of these are very similar in Scots Gaelic. Apologies in advance for misspellings, mistranslations or other forms of incompetence!
Before we start let me just mention that the Irish word for “star” is réalta (plural réaltai), which can also mean “a light”. There is also a diminutive, réiltín. Astronomy is réalteolaíocht and astrophysics is réaltfhisic. I’ve always liked the way astrophysics looks like “real physics”!
That’s enough for now. I have a few more, but they’ll have to wait…
With just over a week to go, I thought I’d post a reminder that Maynooth University is hosting a theoretical physics meeting early next month, from September 6th to 8th; for details see here. It has been decided that there will be a couple of public evening lectures as a double-header on the first night of the conference. One of the speakers is me. Technically I’ll be on sabbatical from September 1st but I’ve delayed my travels to allow me to ive this talk. Anyway, the advert is here:
You can join us for this “evening of science celebrating the weird and wonderful ways that matter can manifest in our universe” by getting a ticket at Eventbrite below.
Tickets are free but you do need to register in advance!
In the Dark 