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Supplement to the Open Journal of Astrophysics – “Pulsar Science with the SKAO”

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , on December 19, 2025 by telescoper

It’s been a busy day at the Open Journal of Astrophysics as we’ve published 12 related papers in the form of our first ever Supplement; officially it is Vol. 8 Supplement Issue 1. The idea of a Supplement is to publish a set of related papers together. I imagine it might be of interest for publishing conference proceedings, etc.

The topic of this Supplement is Pulsar Science with the Square Kilometre Array Observatory and it includes updates to the Science Case for the SKAO, the previous version of which is 10 years old. All the papers are indendependently peer-reviewed, which took some organizing and a lot of time because many potential referees are themselves members of the SKA Pulsar Science Working Group! Anyway, the final versions of all the papers hit the arXiv this morning so I published them all today.

Rather than include all 12 papers in tomorrow’s Saturday update I decided just to show the overlay for the overview of the special issue, which is here:

The following paragraph describes the content of the supplement and includes links to the other 11 papers in the issue.

The large instantaneous sensitivity, a wide frequency coverage and flexible observation modes with large number of beams in the sky are the main features of the upcoming SKA observatory’s two telescopes, the SKA-Low and the SKA-Mid, which are located on two different continents. Owing to these capabilities, the SKAO telescopes are going to be a game-changer for radio astronomy in general and pulsar astronomy in particular. The eleven articles in this special issue on pulsar science with the SKA Observatory describe its impact on different areas of pulsar science. Phase 1 of the rollout of the SKAO telescope is likely to double the known pulsar population in new surveys described in the first three papers (Keane et al. 2025; Abbate et al. 2025; Bagchi et al. 2025). These new discoveries will improve our understanding of the dynamics, evolution and gas content of globular clusters and the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy apart from increasing the samples for each of different kinds of radio emitting neutron stars (Levin et al. 2025). The larger population sample will enhance our understanding of the magneto-ionic interstellar medium (Tiburzi et al. 2025; Xu et al. 2025), the pulsar magnetosphere (Oswald et al. 2025) and pulsar wind nebulae (Gelfand et al. 2025). Moreover, the discovery of exotic neutron star systems will test gravity theory ever more stringently (Krishnan et al. 2025) and will probe fundamental physics at sub-atomic level (Basu et al. 2025). Finally, this enhanced sample is likely to make the sky portrait sharper in nano-Hertz gravitational waves impacting on our understanding of the Universe in a fundamental way (Shannon et al. 2025). In summary, the papers in this special issue describe the way the upcoming SKA Observatory’s telescopes address fundamental physics through the study of pulsars and gravitational waves.

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How magnetism might make galaxies…

Posted in Biographical, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on December 16, 2025 by telescoper

I saw mention of paper recently published in Nature Astronomy by Karsten Jedamzik, Levon Pogosian and Tom Abel with the title Hints of primordial magnetic fields at recombination and implications for the Hubble tension. It’s behind a paywall but there is a version available on the arXiv here. The abstract of the Nature Astronomy version looks like this:

This paper reminded me of a paper I wrote a long time ago (in 1991, when I was at Queen Mary) about primordial magnetic fields and galaxy formation. It had its origins in a lunchtime talk I gave which was based on an old paper from the 1970s by Ira Wasserman. All I did was go through the paper and add a few small comments to update it, including some more recent observational constraints and mentions of dark non-baryonic matter; the Wasserman paper was framed in a model in which all the matter in the Universe was baryonic.

Anyway, the talk went down quite well and I was encouraged to write it up. I did so, and submitted it to a journal (MNRAS). Not unreasonably, it was rejected on the grounds that it didn’t have sufficient original content. I therefore expanded the discussion and submitted it as a review article to Comments on Astrophysics. That journal is now defunct, but the paper can be found on NASA/ADS here. It’s even got some citations!

Here’s the title and abstract:

You can find the whole paper here:

1992ComApDownload

You will see I was advocating a larger magnetic field than in the recent one, with a view to affecting galaxy formation directly rather than larger scale features of the Universe. An important point is that primordial magnetic fields can have a large effect soon after recombination, so they might play a role in the formation of galaxies at high redshift which we are struggling to explain. At least – unlike some of the more exotic explanations that have been proposed – we know that magnetic fields actually exist…

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Everything is a Simple Harmonic Oscillator

Posted in mathematics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on December 13, 2025 by telescoper

Anyone who has studied theoretical physics for any time will be familiar with the simple harmonic oscillator, which I will call the SHO for short. This is a system that can be solved exactly and its solutions can be applied in a wide range of situations where it holds approximately, e.g. when looking at small oscillations around equilibrium. I’ve often remarked in lectures that we spend much of our lives solving the SHO problem in various guises, often pretending that the difficult system we have in front of us can, if looked at in the right way, and with sufficient optimism, be approximated by the much simpler SHO. Cue the old joke that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like nail…

That rambling prelude occurred to me when I found this little problem in some old notes. It is a cute mathematical result that shows that the Friedman equations that underpin our standard cosmological model can in fact be written in the same form as those describing a Simple Harmonic Oscillator. In what follows we take the cosmological constant term to be zero.

The resulting equation is the SHO equation if k>0. I’m not sure whether this result is very useful for anything, but it is cute. It also goes to to show that, if looked at in the right way, the whole Universe is a Simple Harmonic Oscillator!

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Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 13/12/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 13, 2025 by telescoper

It’s time once again for the usual Saturday morning update of the week’s new papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further five papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 195, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 430.

The first paper this week is “Cosmic Rays Masquerading as Cool Cores: An Inverse-Compton Origin for Cool Core Cluster Emission” by Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech), Eliot Quataert (Princeton), Emily M. Silich, Jack Sayers, Sam B. Ponnada and Isabel S. Sands (Caltech).  This was published on Tuesday 9th December 2025 in the folder marked High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. It presents an argument  that cosmic-ray inverse-compton emission could contribute significantly to the X-ray surface brightness (SB) in cool-corre clusters, implying that gas densities may have been overestimated therein.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Cosmic Rays Masquerading as Cool Cores: An Inverse-Compton Origin for Cool Core Cluster Emission" by

Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech), Eliot Quataert (Princeton), Emily M. Silich, Jack Sayers, Sam B. Ponnada and Isabel S. Sands (Caltech)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.154053

December 9, 2025, 7:22 am 1 boosts 0 favorites

The second paper of the week is “Detecting False Positives With Derived Planetary Parameters: Experimenting with the KEPLER Dataset” by Ayan Bin Rafaih (Aitchison College, Lahore, Pakistan) and Zachary Murray (Université Côte d’Azur, France). This one was published on 9th December 2025 in the folder Earth and Planetary Astrophysics. It is an investigation into the performance of a range of machine-learning algorithms on the KEPLER dataset, using precision-recall trade-off and accuracy metrics.

The overlay is here:

You can find the official version of this one on arXiv here. The federated announcement on Mastodon is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Detecting False Positives With Derived Planetary Parameters: Experimenting with the KEPLER Dataset" by Ayan Bin Rafaih (Aitchison College, Lahore, Pakistan) and Zachary Murray (Université Côte d’Azur, France)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.154054

December 9, 2025, 7:34 am 1 boosts 0 favorites

Next one up is “The role of peculiar velocity uncertainties in standard siren cosmology” by Chris Blake and Ryan J. Turner (Swinburne, Australia). This paper discusses the impact of peculiar velocities on the error in H0 determinations from local distance indicators with observed redshifts, incorporating the effect of bulk flows. It was published on Tuesday 9th December in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics.

The overlay is here:

You can find the official accepted version on arXiv here. The fediverse announcement is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "The role of peculiar velocity uncertainties in standard siren cosmology" by Chris Blake and Ryan J. Turner (Swinburne, Australia)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.154055

December 9, 2025, 7:47 am 1 boosts 0 favorites

The fourth article of the week is “Transient QPOs of Fermi-LAT blazars with Linearly Multiplicative Oscillations” by P. Penil (Clemson University, USA) and 7 others based in the USA, Italy and Germany. This was published on Thursday 10th December in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. This paper presents an investigation of patterns of quasi-periodic oscillations in observed blazar systems characterized by periodic multiplicative amplitudes including both the periodicities and long-term variations.  The overlay is here:

You can find the official published version on arXiv here. The Fediverse announcement follows:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Transient QPOs of Fermi-LAT blazars with Linearly Multiplicative Oscillations" by P. Penil (Clemson University, USA) and 7 others based in the USA, Italy and Germany

doi.org/10.33232/001c.154123

December 10, 2025, 12:22 pm 0 boosts 1 favorites

The last paper for this week is “Tidally Delayed Spin-Down of Very Low Mass Stars” by Ketevan Kotorashvili and Eric G. Blackman (U. Rochester, USA). This was published on Friday 12th December (yesterday) in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. It discusses the effect of tides from sub-stellar companions on rotational evolution of very low-mass stars, suggesting that these may explain the dearth of field, late-type M dwarfs with intermediate rotation periods.

The overlay is here:

 

You can find the officially-accepted version on arXiv here, and the Mastodon announcement is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Tidally Delayed Spin-Down of Very Low Mass Stars" by Ketevan Kotorashvili and Eric G. Blackman (U. Rochester, USA)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.154268

December 12, 2025, 10:31 am 1 boosts 0 favorites

 

And that concludes the update for this week. I will do another of these regular announcements next Saturday, which will be the last such update for 2025. Will we make it past 200 for the year? Tune in next week to find out!

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Black Holes, Hawking Radiation (and AI…)

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on December 7, 2025 by telescoper

It seems to be a common misapprehension that the energy released by the supermassive black holes in, for example, active galactic nuclei is in the form of Hawking radiation. It isn’t. Hawking radiation is only significant for black holes of very low mass. The radiation produced around supermassive black holes is due to the extremely high density and temperate of matter falling into the black hole through an accretion disk not due to the evaporation of the black hole itself. Hawking radiation has never been experimentally detected.

Hawking showed that the a black hole will produce black-body radiation with a temperature, the Hawking Temperature, given by TH in a beautiful formula below that brings together constants relating to gravity, statistical mechanics, quantum theory and relativity:

You can see that the Hawking Temperature is inversely proportional to the mass of the black hole M so is largest for very small black holes. In fact for a black hole with mass of order that of the Moon, the Hawking Temperature is just 3 Kelvin. Since the Universe is bathed in cosmic radiation with this temperature, such a black hole would not evaporate at all because it would absorb as much radiation as it emits by the Hawking mechanism as would any black hole of mass greater than this. The Hawking temperature for a supermassive black hole is many orders of magnitude lower than this, so Hawking radiation is completely irrelevant.

Notice that if a black hole does start to evaporate then its mass begins to decrease. Its Hawking temperature therefore increases so its mass decreases even more quickly. In the end the mass gets so low and the temperature so high that the black hole effectively explodes. Nobody really knows how to describe the final stage as it relies on physics we don’t understand.

Anyway, this all reminds that years ago I set an examination question that involved applying the Hawking formula above to calculate the lifetime of a black hole of mass M. It’s not too hard to show that it scales as M-3. Another part of the question asked: what is the mass of a black hole whose Hawking Temperature is room temperature (say 300 K), what would be the Schwarzschild radius of such a black hole, and what would be its lifetime?

I’ll leave it to my readers to plug the numbers into the Hawking formula above to derive the mass, etc. Please submit your answers through the comments box below. The first correct entry does not win a prize, not even a joke Peace Prize.

For a laugh I asked Google for the answer. Here is the AI summary:

Bonus marks for pointing out everything that’s wrong in this summary.

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Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 06/12/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 6, 2025 by telescoper

Once again it’s time for the usual Saturday morning update of the week’s new papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further six papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 190, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 425. I blogged about the significance of the latter figure here.

The first paper this week is “The galaxy-IGM connection in THESAN: observability and information content of the galaxy-Lyman-alpha cross-correlation at z>6” by Enrico Garaldi (U. Tokyo, Japan), Verena Bellscheidt (Tech. U. Munich, Germany), Aaron Smith (U. Texas Austin, USA) and Rahul Kannan (York U. Canada). This paper was published on Monday 1st December 2025 in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. It describes an investigation of the impact of observational limitations on the ability to retrieve the intrinsic galaxy-Lyman-alpha cross correlation from line-of-sight observations.

The overlay is here:

 

 

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "The galaxy-IGM connection in THESAN: observability and information content of the galaxy-Lyman-alpha cross-correlation at z>6" by Enrico Garaldi (U. Tokyo, Japan), Verena Bellscheidt (Tech. U. Munich, Germany), Aaron Smith (U. Texas Austin, USA) and Rahul Kannan (York U. Canada)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.151666

December 1, 2025, 8:37 am 1 boosts 0 favorites

The second paper of the week is “A Less Terrifying Universe? Mundanity as an Explanation for the Fermi Paradox” by Robin H.D. Corbet (U. Maryland, USA). This paper was published on 1st December 2025 in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. It presents a discussion of possible explanations for the lack of s evidence for the presence of technology-using extraterrestrial civilizations in the Galaxy (usually called the Fermi paradox). The overlay is here:

 

 

You can find the official version of this one on arXiv here. The federated announcement on Mastodon is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "A Less Terrifying Universe? Mundanity as an Explanation for the Fermi Paradox" by Robin H.D. Corbet (U. Maryland, USA)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.151454

December 1, 2025, 8:50 am 2 boosts 2 favorites

 

Next one up is “Sulphur abundances in star-forming regions from optical emission lines: A new approach based on photoionization models consistent with the direct method” by Enrique Pérez-Montero, Borja Pérez-Díaz, & José M. Vílchez ( (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain), Igor A. Zinchenko (LMU, Germany), Asier Castrillo, Marta Gavilán, Sandra Zamora & Ángeles I. Díaz (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain). This was published on 1st December 2025 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. This study uses the emission lines produced in the optical part of the spectrum and with photoionization models to derive sulphur chemical abundances in the gas-phase of star-forming galaxies.

The overlay is here:

 

 

You can find the official accepted version on arXiv here. The fediverse announcement is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Sulphur abundances in star-forming regions from optical emission lines: A new approach based on photoionization models consistent with the direct method" by Enrique Pérez-Montero, Borja Pérez-Díaz, & José M. Vílchez ( (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain), Igor A. Zinchenko (LMU, Germany), Asier Castrillo, Marta Gavilán, Sandra Zamora & Ángeles I. Díaz (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid , Spain)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.151253

December 1, 2025, 9:12 am 0 boosts 0 favorites

The fourth article of the week is “Bayesian Posteriors with Stellar Population Synthesis on GPUs” by Georgios Zacharegkas & Andrew Hearin (Argonne National Laboratory, USA) and Andrew Benson (Carnegie Observatories, USA). This is an exploration of a range of computational techniques aimed at accelerating Stellar Population Synthesis predictions of galaxy photometry using the JAX library to target GPUs (Graphics Processing Units, in case you didn’t know). This paper was published on Tuesday December 2nd 2025 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies.

The overlay is here:

 

You can find the official published version on arXiv here. The Fediverse announcement follows:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Bayesian Posteriors with Stellar Population Synthesis on GPUs" by Georgios Zacharegkas & Andrew Hearin (Argonne National Laboratory, USA) and Andrew Benson (Carnegie Observatories, USA)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.151255

December 2, 2025, 7:38 am 3 boosts 1 favorites

Next one up is “IAEmu: Learning Galaxy Intrinsic Alignment Correlations” by Sneh Pandya Yuanyuan Yang, Nicholas Van Alfen, Jonathan Blazek and Robin Walters (Northeastern University, Boston, USA). This presents a neural-network-based emulator that predicts the galaxy position-position, position-orientation, and orientation-orientation, correlation functions and their uncertainties using mock catalogs based on the halo occupation distribution (HOD) framework. It was published on December 2nd 2025 in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. The overlay is here:

The official accepted version can be found on arXiv here. The Mastodon announcement is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "IAEmu: Learning Galaxy Intrinsic Alignment Correlations" by Sneh Pandya Yuanyuan Yang, Nicholas Van Alfen, Jonathan Blazek and Robin Walters (Northeastern University, Boston, USA)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.151749

December 2, 2025, 7:52 am 1 boosts 0 favorites

The last paper for this weel is “Unraveling the Nature of the Nuclear Transient AT2020adpi” by Paarmita Pandey (Ohio State University, USA) and a team of 15 others based in the USA, UK and Australia. This was published on Thursday December 4th 2025 in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. It is an investigation into a particular transient event AT2020adpi and a discussion of whether it is an extreme example of AGN variability or a Tidal Disruption Event (TDE). The overlay is here:

You can find the officially-accepted version on arXiv here, and the Mastodon announcement is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Unraveling the Nature of the Nuclear Transient AT2020adpi" by Paarmita Pandey (Ohio State University, USA) and 15 others based in the USA, UK and Australia

doi.org/10.33232/001c.151453

December 4, 2025, 8:48 am 1 boosts 0 favorites

And that concludes the update for this week. I will do another next Saturday.

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MAUVE Image Simulation

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on December 2, 2025 by telescoper

Since the successful launch of the MAUVE satellite on Friday, the telescope has been undergoing verification and calibration. Meanwhile, I’ve been hard at work using my advanced image processing skills to simulate what images of astronomical objects seen in other wavebands might look like using MAUVE.

Here’s an example.

The original picture below is a famous image that needs no introduction. Simply move the slider to the left to reveal the MAUVE version…

P.S. Apologies that the software does not quite scale the images correctly.

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Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 29/11/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 29, 2025 by telescoper

It’s Saturday again, so it’s time for the usual update of the week’s new papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Publishing this week was interrupted by the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States, which meant there were no arXiv announcements yesterday. Nevertheless, since the last update we have published another four papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 184, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 419.

The first paper this week is “A theoretical prediction for the dipole in nearby distances using cosmography” by Hayley J. Macpherson (U. Chicago, USA) and Asta Heinesen (Niels Bohr Institute, Denmark). This was published on Monday 24th November 2025 in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. It presents a method to predict the dipole in luminosity distances that arises due to nearby inhomogeneities to leading-order correction to the standard isotropic distance-redshift law. Incidentally, I wrote about a talk by one of the authors here.

The overlay is here:

 

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "A theoretical prediction for the dipole in nearby distances using cosmography" by Hayley J Macpherson (U. Chicago, USA) and Asta Heinesen (Niels Bohr Institute, Denmark)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.150319

November 24, 2025, 8:25 am 2 boosts 1 favorites

 

The second paper of the week is “A Targeted Gamma-Ray Search of Five Prominent Galaxy Merger Systems with 17 years of Fermi-LAT Data” by Siddhant Manna and Shantanu Desai (IIT Hyderabad Kandi, India). This one was published on Tuesday November 25th 2025 in the folder marked High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. It describes a search for gamma-ray emission in Fermi-LAT data from five merging galaxy systems with marginal detections for two of them

The overlay is here:

 

You can find the official version of this one on arXiv here. The federated announcement on Mastodon is here:

 

Next one up is “Metallicity fluctuation statistics in the interstellar medium and young stars – II. Elemental cross-correlations and the structure of chemical abundance space” by Mark R. Krumholz (ANU, Australia), Yuan-Sen Ting (Ohio State U., USA), Zefeng Li (Durham U., UK), Chuhan Zhang (ANU), Jennifer Mead (Columbia U., USA) and Melissa K. Ness (ANU). This was published in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies on Wednesday November 26th. It presents an extended stochastically-forced diffusion model for the chemical evolution of galaxies, making quantitative predictions for the degree of correlation in abundance patterns in both gas and young stars.

The overlay is here:

 

You can find the official accepted version on arXiv here. The fediverse announcement is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Metallicity fluctuation statistics in the interstellar medium and young stars – II. Elemental cross-correlations and the structure of chemical abundance space" by Mark R. Krumholz (ANU, Australia), Yuan-Sen Ting (Ohio State U., USA), Zefeng Li (Durham U., UK), Chuhan Zhang (ANU), Jennifer Mead (Columbia U., USA) and Melissa K. Ness (ANU)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.150356

November 26, 2025, 8:34 am 1 boosts 1 favorites

The fourth and final paper of the week is “Simulating realistic Lyman-alpha emitting galaxies including the effect of radiative transfer” by Hasti Khoraminezhad & Shun Saito (Missouri Institute of Science & Technology, USA), Max Gronke (U. Heidelberg, Germany) and Chris Byrohl (MPA Garching, Germany). An empirical model for Lyman-alpha emitters (LAEs) which provides predictions for the halo occupation distributions and relationship between luminosity and halo mass, including the distribution of satellite LAEs. It was published on Thursday November 27th 2025 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies.

The overlay is here:

You can find the official published version on arXiv here. The Fediverse announcement follows:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Simulating realistic Lyman-alpha emitting galaxies including the effect of radiative transfer" by Hasti Khoraminezhad & Shun Saito (Missouri Institute of Science & Technology, USA), Max Gronke (U. Heidelberg, Germany) and Chris Byrohl (MPA Garching, Germany)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.151254

November 27, 2025, 9:20 am 1 boosts 1 favorites

And that concludes the update for this week. I will do another next Saturday.

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MAUVE Launched!

Posted in Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on November 28, 2025 by telescoper

After a false start a couple of days ago, the satellite MAUVE was launched at (10.44 Pacific Time (18.44 GMT) today from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on a SpaceX Falcon-9 Transporter-15. So far, about 40 minutes after liftoff, it’s looking good.

You can see the live feed here:

As far as I know the launch went perfectly, but I’m waiting for confirmation of payload deployment, which begins about an hour after launch. The vehicle is carrying 140 different satellites, of which MAUVE (“Mission to Analyze the UltraViolet universE”) is just one.

The following is taken from my previous post. I repeat it here for completeness.

The Falcon-9 launcher ready to go, but not going…
The payload: MAUVE is at the bottom right
Closeup of MAUVE

I’m not personally involved in MAUVE but the Department of Physics at Maynooth University is, through my colleague Dr Emma Whelan (who sent the above pictures) and her group. You can read more about the science – related to star and planet formation – it will do in a nice piece by Emma on RTÉ Brainstorm.

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MAUVE Postponed

Posted in Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on November 26, 2025 by telescoper

I was hoping to do a post this evening about the satellite MAUVE which was due to be launched at 18.18 GMT from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on a SpaceX Falcon-9 Transporter-15. Unfortunately the launched was scrubbed with about 15 minutes to go. In fact it was originally scheduled for 11th November but was postponed then. It’s now supposed to be launched on Friday 28th November. Let’s hope it’s third time lucky!

MAUVE is a small satellite, which is to be launched with a number of others; the name stands for “Mission to Analyze the UltraViolet universE” and the heart of it is a 60cm ultraviolet telescope.

The Falcon-9 launcher ready to go, but not going…
The payload: MAUVE is at the bottom right
Closeup of MAUVE

I’m not personally involved in MAUVE but the Department of Physics at Maynooth University is, through my colleague Dr Emma Whelan (who sent the above pictures) and her group. You can read more about the science – related to star and planet formation – it will do in a nice piece by Emma on RTÉ Brainstorm.

There’s a more technical description of MAUVE on the arXiv here. The abstract reads:

We present the mission concept “Mission to Analyze the UltraViolet universE” (MAUVE), a wide-field spectrometer and imager conceived during the inaugural NASA Astrophysics Mission Design School. MAUVE responds to the 2023 Announcement of Opportunity for Probe-class missions, with a budget cap of $1 billion, and would hypothetically launch in 2031. However, the formulation of MAUVE was an educational exercise and the mission is not being developed further. The Principal Investigator-led science of MAUVE aligns with the priorities outlined in the 2020 Astrophysics Decadal Survey, enabling new characterizations of exoplanet atmospheres, the early-time light curves of some of the universe’s most explosive transients, and the poorly-understood extragalactic background light. Because the Principal Investigator science occupies 30% of the observing time available during the mission’s 5 yr lifespan, we provide an observing plan that would allow for 70% of the observing time to be used for General Observer programs, with community-solicited proposals. The onboard detector (THISTLE) claims significant heritage from the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph on Hubble, but extends its wavelength range down to the extreme UV. We note that MAUVE would be the first satellite in decades with the ability to access this regime of the electromagnetic spectrum. MAUVE has a field of view of 900″ x 900″ a photometric sensitivity extending to mUV ≤ 24 , and a resolving power of R ~ 1000. This paper provides full science and mission traceability matrices for this concept, and also outlines cost and scheduling timelines aimed at enabling a within-budget mission and an on-time launch.

Anyway, I hope to be able to give an update on Friday evening about the successful launch of MAUVE. Fingers crossed!

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