Archive for the The Universe and Stuff Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Denario

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on November 3, 2025 by telescoper

I’ve been alerted (by one of the authors) to a paper in the computer science/artificial intelligence section on arXiv, called The Denario project: Deep knowledge AI agents for scientific discovery by Francisco Villaescusa-Navarro et al. The abstract follows:

We present Denario, an AI multi-agent system designed to serve as a scientific research assistant. Denario can perform many different tasks, such as generating ideas, checking the literature, developing research plans, writing and executing code, making plots, and drafting and reviewing a scientific paper. The system has a modular architecture, allowing it to handle specific tasks, such as generating an idea, or carrying out end-to-end scientific analysis using Cmbagent as a deep-research backend. In this work, we describe in detail Denario and its modules, and illustrate its capabilities by presenting multiple AI-generated papers generated by it in many different scientific disciplines such as astrophysics, biology, biophysics, biomedical informatics, chemistry, material science, mathematical physics, medicine, neuroscience and planetary science. Denario also excels at combining ideas from different disciplines, and we illustrate this by showing a paper that applies methods from quantum physics and machine learning to astrophysical data. We report the evaluations performed on these papers by domain experts, who provided both numerical scores and review-like feedback. We then highlight the strengths, weaknesses, and limitations of the current system. Finally, we discuss the ethical implications of AI-driven research and reflect on how such technology relates to the philosophy of science. We publicly release the code at this https URL. A Denario demo can also be run directly on the web at this https URL, and the full app will be deployed on the cloud.

arXiv:2510.26887

Here’s a random picture from the paper:

I haven’t had time to read the paper yet – it’s 270 pages long – but I’m sure it will provoke strong reactions both in favour and against the idea of an AI research assistant. Comments are welcome through the box below.

P.S. The name Denario appears to be derived from the Latin “denarius”, a coin roughly equivalent to a day’s pay for a skilled worker in the days of the Roman Empire. More amusingly, “denarius” is the origin of the Polari word “dinarly”, meaning “money”. If I get time I must generate a Polari version of this manuscript.

2 Comments »

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 01/11/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on November 1, 2025 by telescoper

It’s time once again for the usual Saturday update of the week’s new papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics (although a bit later in the day than usual). Since the last update we have published another two papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 163, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 398.

The first paper this week is “Instability and vertical eccentricity variation in global hydrodynamic disk simulations” by Janosz W Dewberry (U. Mass. Amherst, USA), Henrik N. Latter and Gordon I. Ogilvie (U. Cambridge, UK) and Sebastien Fromang (U. Paris Saclay, France). This article was published in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics on Tuesday 28th October 2025; it discusses the instabilities and eccentricity variations generated in numerical hydrodynamic simulations of accretion disks.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

The Fediverse announcement is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Instability and vertical eccentricity variation in global hydrodynamic disk simulations" by Janosz W Dewberry (U. Mass. Amherst, USA), Henrik N Latter and Gordon I Ogilvie (U. Cambridge, UK) & Sebastien Fromang (U. Paris Saclay, France)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.146332

October 28, 2025, 9:43 am 2 boosts 0 favorites

The second (and last) paper of the week is “Fast X-ray Transient Detection with AXIS: application to Magnetar Giant Flares” by Michela Negro (Louisiana State University, USA) and 8 others based in the USA and Canada. This one was also published on Tuesday 28th October, but in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. It presents a feasibility study of detecting Magnetar Giant Flares with the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite (AXIS). The overlay is here:

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

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Fast X-ray Transient Detection with AXIS: application to Magnetar Giant Flares" by Michela Negro (Louisiana State University, USA) and 8 others based in the USA and Canada

doi.org/10.33232/001c.146360

October 28, 2025, 10:02 am 1 boosts 1 favorites

It being a relatively slow week we didn’t reach the 400 mark as I thought we might, but we will probably get there next week. After 10 months of the year 2025, in which we have published 163 papers, a rough projection for the 2025 total is 195. We do have some extra papers up our sleeve, however, so we might well reach 200 for the year. We will find out soon enough!

1 Comment »

On the Evidence for Supersymmetry from CMS…

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on October 27, 2025 by telescoper

Every now and again I look at the latest particle physics literature on arXiv to see what’s going on. The other day I saw a preprint there which gives a review of the latest results on supersymmetry from the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. I should explain that, in experimental particle physics, “compact” means “fucking enormous”.

Anyway, the abstract of the paper reads:

The Run 2 data-taking period of the CERN Large Hadron Collider during years 2015-2018 provided about 140 fb-1 of proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV, offering an unprecedented opportunity to explore supersymmetry (SUSY) across a wide range of experimental signatures. CMS responded with a broad and diverse search program, carrying out dozens of analyses that probed a multitude of final states and systematically explored different regions of the SUSY parameter space. No significant deviations from standard model predictions were observed, and the results were used for constraining the SUSY landscape. In this review, I provide a comprehensive account of the CMS Run 2 SUSY program, covering its strategy, targeted models, and analysis methods. I then present the full set of searches and conclude with their combined impact through simplified model and phenomenological MSSM interpretations.

arXiv:2510.17971

Here is one of the pretty pictures from the review. This one shows the constraints on the masses of any supersymmetric counterparts of the electroweak gauge bosons.

To summarize the evidence for supersymmetry from CMS, there is none, nil, nought, nada, zero, zilch, zip, sweet Fanny Adams, bugger-all and diddly-squat. I hope this clarifies the situation.

1 Comment »

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 25/10/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 25, 2025 by telescoper

It may be a Bank Holiday weekend here in Ireland, but it’s still time for the usual Saturday update of the week’s new papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics (although a bit later in the day than usual). Since the last update we have published another five papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 161, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 396.

This week’s update  is rather unusual because there are four papers in a series (or, more precisely, mathematically speaking, a sequence) all published on the same day (Wednesday October 22nd 2025), in the same folder (Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics), with the same first author (Dhayaa Anbajagane of the University of Chicago), with long author lists and many co-authors in common. These papers all relate to the DECADE cosmic shear project. Instead of doing them one by one, therefore, I’ve decided to put all four overlays together and provide links to all the papers afterwards. As I’m trying to encourage people to follow our feed on the Fediverse via Mastodon (where I announce papers as they are published, including the all-important DOI),  I’ll include links to each announcement there too.

  1. “The DECADE cosmic shear project I: A new weak lensing shape catalog of 107 million galaxies“, accepted version on arXiv here.
  2. “The DECADE cosmic shear project II: photometric redshift calibration of the source galaxy sample“, accepted version on arXiv here.
  3. “The DECADE cosmic shear project III: validation of analysis pipeline using spatially inhomogeneous data“, accepted version on arXiv here.
  4. “The DECADE cosmic shear project IV: cosmological constraints from 107 million galaxies across 5,400 deg2 of the sky“, accepted version on arXiv here.

The fediverse announcements follow:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "The DECADE cosmic shear project I: A new weak lensing shape catalog of 107 million galaxies" by Dhayaa Anbajagane (University of Chicago, USA) et al. (54 authors)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.146158

October 22, 2025, 12:42 pm 2 boosts 0 favorites

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "The DECADE cosmic shear project II: photometric redshift calibration of the source galaxy sample" by Dhayaa Anbajagane (University of Chicago, USA) et al. (53 authors)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.146159

October 22, 2025, 1:07 pm 2 boosts 0 favorites

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "The DECADE cosmic shear project III: validation of analysis pipeline using spatially inhomogeneous data" by Dhayaa Anbajagane (University of Chicago, USA) et al. (53 authors)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.146160

October 22, 2025, 1:57 pm 1 boosts 0 favorites

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "The DECADE cosmic shear project IV: cosmological constraints from 107 million galaxies across 5,400 deg^2 of the sky" by Dhayaa Anbajagane (University of Chicago, USA) et al. (75 authors)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.146161

October 22, 2025, 2:47 pm 1 boosts 0 favorites

 

The fifth and final paper for this week is “Clustering of DESI galaxies split by thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect” by Michael Rashkovetskyi of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, or CfA for short, and 48 others. This one was published on Wednesday 23rd October in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. This paper explores how the clustering properties of galaxies mapped by the Dark energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) relate to the local thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich emission mapped by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT). The overlay is here:

The officially accepted version can be found on arXiv here, and the fediverse announcement is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Clustering of DESI galaxies split by thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect" by Michael Rashkovetskyi (Cfa Harvard-Smithsonian, USA) et al. (49 authors)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.146033

October 23, 2025, 8:28 am 1 boosts 0 favorites

 

That concludes the papers for this week. With one week to go and our total at 396, I still think we might reach the 400 total by the end of October.

1 Comment »

Ireland in CERN!

Posted in Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , on October 22, 2025 by telescoper
Photo by Pietro Battistoni on Pexels.com

I saw the news today that the Republic of Ireland is now officially an associate member state of the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, better known as CERN. This has been in the pipeline for a while: I blogged about it here, for example. But today’s the day that Ireland formally joined.

I think this is a very good move for Irish physics, and indeed for Ireland generally. I will, however, repeat a worry that I have expressed previously. There is an important point about CERN membership, however, which I hope is not sidelined. The case for joining CERN made at political levels was 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 (ESO), which Ireland joined 7 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 purely 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  €1.9M). I would estimate a figure of around half that would be needed to support CERN-based science. I am given to understand that some funds have been made available as part of the joining arrangements, but I don’t know the details.

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 that decision 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, the Irish Government 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.

The recent merger of Science Foundation Ireland and the Irish Research Council to form a single entity called Research Ireland could provide an opportunity to correct this shortfall in funding for science exploitation. The reorganization won’t do anything on its own, however: the overall level of public sector research funding will have to increase dramatically from its current level, well below the OECD average. The recent Budget in Ireland for 2026 does include an allocation of €426 million for research under the National Development Plan, but how much of this will find its way into basic research generally and CERN science in particular?

5 Comments »

On Cosmography (and going Mainstream)

Posted in Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on October 19, 2025 by telescoper

On Friday I attended a colloquium in the Physics Department at Maynooth University by Asta Heinesen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. The talk had the title of Cosmography of the local Universe, as shown on the first slide:

Asta talked about a very interesting programme of work that takes a different approach from most of modern cosmology in that it avoids making the prior assumption of global homogeneity and isotropy embodied by the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker metric. In particular, instead of assuming the isotropic expansion of the Universe, it tries to determine its properties directly using only such measurements as luminosity distances and redshifts. This method is not entirely model-independent because it does assume Lorentz invariance and the conditions required for the Etherington Reciprocity Theorem to hold, but it does not assume any particular form of the metric, so can be applied on scales where the distribution of matter is inhomogeneous and isotropic, e.g. in our local neighbourhood.

To apply this “metric-free” idea one has to construct as general as possible description of the kinematic properties of the underlying matter flow, allowing the global expansion to be anisotropic, and for there to be both rotation and shear. Obviously one would need a large number of measurements to extract anything like a full description of the matter flow, so generally one is restricted to deriving the low-order multipoles (monopole. dipole and quadrupole) as well as the observer’s velocity with respect to the large-scale matter flow.

I found Asta Heinesen’s seminar very stimulating in itself, but it was also nice to see that one of the papers on which it was based is published in the Open Journal of Astrophysics:

When I checked it, I found it was published on my birthday! Here is the overlay:

I announced it on this blog here.

I freely admit that I feel quite proud to have played a small part in helping to get such interesting work published. I’m seeing more and more papers referenced like this, actually. I was reminded of the recent announcement of this year’s list of MacArthur Fellows. among them Kareem El-Badry who has published quite a few papers with the Open Journal of Astrophysics. His biography on the MacArthur Foundation page includes this:

He has published articles in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, The Astrophysical Journal, and The Open Journal of Astrophysics, among other leading scientific journals.

I’m pleased to see us listed with the established names. I mention this just in case there are still people out there who think it might damage their career if they publish with a non-mainstream journal. We are mainstream now…

3 Comments »

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 18/10/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 18, 2025 by telescoper

It’s time once again for the usual Saturday update of the week’s new papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published four  more papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 156, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 391.

I’d like to encourage people to follow our feed on the Fediverse via Mastodon (where I announce papers as they are published, including the all-important DOI) so this week I’ll include links to each announcement there.

The first paper to report is “Shot noise in clustering power spectra” by Nicolas Tessore (University College London, UK) and Alex Hall (University of Edinburgh, UK). This was published in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics on Tuesday October 14th 2025. This presents a discussion of the effects of ‘shot noise’, an additive contribution due to degenerate pairs of points, in angular galaxy clustering power spectra. Here is a screen grab of the overlay:

You can find the officially accepted version of the paper here. The Mastodon announcement is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Shot noise in clustering power spectra" by Nicolas Tessore (University College London, UK) and Alex Hall (University of Edinburgh, UK)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.145919

October 14, 2025, 7:07 am 2 boosts 0 favorites

Next one up is “The Giant Arc – Filament or Figment?” by Till Sawala and Meri Teeriaho (University of Helsinki, Finland). This paper discusses the abundance of large arc-like structures formed in the standard cosmological model, with reference to the “Giant Arc” identified in MgII absorption systems. It was published on Wednesday October 15th in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. The overlay is here:

The officially accepted version of this paper can be found on the arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "The Giant Arc – Filament or Figment?" by Till Sawala and Meri Teeriaho (University of Helsinki, Finland)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.145931

October 15, 2025, 6:33 am 2 boosts 3 favorites

 

The third paper this week,  published on Monday 6th October, is “Detecting wide binaries using machine learning algorithms” by Amoy Ashesh, Harsimran Kaur and Sandeep Aashish (Indian Institute of Technology, Patna, India). This was published on Friday 17th October (yesterday) in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It presents a method for detecting wide binary systems in Gaia data using machine learning algorithms.

The overlay is here:

 

You can find the officially accepted version of this paper on arXiv here. The announcement on Mastodon is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Detecting wide binaries using machine learning algorithms" by Amoy Ashesh, Harsimran Kaur and Sandeep Aashish (Indian Institute of Technology, Patna, India)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.146027

October 17, 2025, 6:55 am 0 boosts 0 favorites

The last one this week is “Learned harmonic mean estimation of the Bayesian evidence with normalizing flows” by Alicja Polanska & Matthew A. Price (University College London, UK), Davide Piras (Université de Genève, CH), Alessio Spurio Mancini (Royal Holloway, London, UK) and Jason D. McEwen (University College London). This one was also published on Friday 17th October, but in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics; it presents a new method for estimating Bayesian evidence for use in model comparison, illustrated with a cosmological example.

The corresponding overlay is here:

 

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here. The Mastodon announcement is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Learned harmonic mean estimation of the Bayesian evidence with normalizing flows" by Alicja Polanska & Matthew A. Price (University College London, UK), Davide Piras (Université de Genève, CH), Alessio Spurio Mancini (Royal Holloway, London, UK) and Jason D. McEwen (University College London)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.146026

October 17, 2025, 7:06 am 0 boosts 0 favorites

That concludes the papers for this week. With two weeks to go I think we might reach the 400 total by the end of October.

1 Comment »

Calling all Irish weather and climate enthusiasts! 

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

Just a quick post to share an opportunity to get involved in a bit of Citizen Science. The inestimable Zooniverse has teamed up with Met Éireann, the Irish National Meteorological Service, in a project called Irish Weather Rescue. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to help digitize historical weather records that currently only exist on paper. Currently only a few percent of the available records have been digitised.

The project aims to provide access to valuable data that will improve our understanding of how rainfall patterns have changed over longer timescales and provide context for the changes we see in our current climate and possible future climate. Met Éireann’s archive contains an extensive collection of historical weather observations that include meteorological registers, rainfall registers, climatological reports, weather diaries, monthly weather bulletins and maps. These handwritten paper records are at risk of being lost due to the vulnerability of the original paper documents. By creating a digital copy of these records and extracting the data contained in them we can use the data to monitor climate variability and change, support effective climate risk management and improve climate model projections.

To read more about the project and/or volunteer, see here.

Leave a comment »

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 11/10/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 11, 2025 by telescoper

It’s time once again for the usual Saturday update of the week’s new papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published six  more papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 152, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 387. Not only have we passed the 150 mark for the year, but this week saw another record for the Journal, in that it was the first week in which we published at least one paper on every day.

Anyway, here are this week’s papers:

The first paper is “Mapping the Nearest Ancient Sloshing Cold Front in the Sky with XMM-Newton” by Sheng-Chieh Lin (University of Kentucky) and 10 others based in the USA, Spain and Germany. This article, published on Monday 6th October 2025, in the section High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena discusses cold fronts in the Virgo Cluster, their importance in shaping the thermal dynamics of the intracluster medium beyond the cluster core, and their implications for cluster cosmology.

The overlay is here:

 

The officially accepted version of this paper can be found on the arXiv here.

The second paper this week, also published on Monday 6th October, is “Testing gravitational physics by combining DESI DR1 and weak lensing datasets using the E_G estimator” by S.J. Rauhut (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia) and an international cast of 63 others. This one is in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, and it presents a comparison of  Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) measurements from BOSS, DESI with weak lensing from KiDS, DES and HSC showing that the results are altogether consistent with the standard cosmological model.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version of this paper on arXiv here.

Next one up is “Analysis of Galaxies at the Extremes: Failed Galaxy Progenitors in the MAGNETICUM Simulations” by Jonah S. Gannon (Swinburne University, Australia), Lucas C. Kimmig (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Germany; LMU), Duncan A. Forbes (Swinburne), Jean P. Brodie (Swinburne), Lucas M. Valenzuela (LMU), Rhea-Silvia Remus (LMU), Joel L. Pfeffer (Swinburne) and Klaus Dolag (LMU). This paper, published on Tuesday 7th October 2025, in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, discusses the business of identifying the possible high-redshift progenitors of low-redshift ultra-diffuse galaxies in cosmological simulations.

The corresponding overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

The fourth paper this week, published on Wednesday 8th October 2025 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies,  is
“What Sets the Metallicity of Ultra-Faint Dwarfs?” by Vance Wheeler, Andrey Kravtsov, Anirudh Chiti & Harley Katz (U. Chicago) and Vadim A. Semenov (CfA Harvard), all based in the USA.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially-accepted version on arXiv here.

Next, and fifth, we have our 150th publication of 2025, “Synthesizer: a Software Package for Synthetic Astronomical Observables” by Christopher C. Lovell (Cambridge, UK), William J. Roper, Aswin P. Vijayan & Stephen M. Wilkins (Sussex, UK), Sophie Newman (Portsmouth, UK) and Louise Seeyave (Sussex). This paper presents a suite of software tools for creating synthetic astrophysical observables for use in mock galaxy catalogues. It was published on Thursday 9th October 2025 in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

And finally for this week we have “Introducing the THESAN-ZOOM project: radiation-hydrodynamic simulations of high-redshift galaxies with a multi-phase interstellar medium” by Rahul Kannan (York University, Canada) and 13 others based in the USA, Germany, Japan, Italy and the UK. This one was published on Friday 10th October (i.e. yesterday) in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It describes a comprehensive suite of high-resolution zoom-in simulations of high-redshift galaxies, encompassing a diverse range of halo masses, selected from the THESAN simulation volume.

The corresponding overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version of this one on arXiv here.

That concludes the papers for this week. I will, however, add a short postscript. This week saw the announcement of this year’s list of MacArthur Fellows. among them Kareem El-Badry who has published quite a few papers with the Open Journal of Astrophysics. His biography on the MacArthur Foundation page includes this:

He has published articles in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, The Astrophysical Journal, and The Open Journal of Astrophysics, among other leading scientific journals.

I’m pleased to see us listed with the established names. I mention this just in case there are still people out there who think it might damage their career if they publish with a non-mainstream journal. I guess we are mainstream now…

1 Comment »

Caveman Physics

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on October 9, 2025 by telescoper

A colleague sent me this, so I thought I’d share it:

Of course we can’t be sure whether there’s a singularity or not because of the presence of a horizon…

Leave a comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »