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.
Today, 1st December, is World Aids Day, which is dedicated to raising awareness of the AIDS pandemic caused by the spread of HIV infection, mourning those who have died of the disease, and showing solidarity with those living with HIV. In my case it’s also a day for remembering how lucky I have been.
Here’s me just about to leave the house this morning with my red ribbon.
Maynooth University Library, home of the famous cat
Today is 1st December 2025, which means that it’s eight years to the day since I started work at Maynooth University. Despite the frustrations, I’m still very happy I made the move all that time ago.
We’ve now had more than a year since the merger of the former Departments of Theoretical and Experimental Physics. This has gone pretty well, actually, with significant improvements in terms of some steps forward in rationalising teaching. It does, however, feel less like a merger and more like an acquisition, with the theoretical activity effectively subsumed into the old Experimental Physics department. I suppose that was inevitable given the relative sizes of the two former Departments, but it has led to a loss of identity and the loss of the group spirit we use to have in Theoretical Physics. To add to this a number of familiar faces have left – two of my own PhD students, Aonghus Hunter-McCabe and Aoibhinn Gallagher have graduated and left, as have others with different supervisors. I am delighted for their success, of course, but will miss having them around.
I continue to enjoy teaching, and was pleasantly surprised to continue doing the same modules this academic year as last. The big change in that regard has been the adoption of different assessment methods to deal with the possibility of students using AI to do their coursework. That seems to be going reasonably well, though I’ll have to wait until the January examinations to see the outcomes.
The thing I’m probably most proud of over the past eight years is, with the huge help of staff at Maynooth University Library, getting the Open Journal of Astrophysics off the ground and attracting some excellent papers. This year has seen yet more significant growth, publications this year set to reach 200, after 120 in 2024 and just 50 the year before that (2024). We’re still smaller than many of the mainstream astrophysics journals, but we’re still growing…
Anyway, eight years of service mean that only two remain until I can claim the full state pension. I’ll be retiring as soon as I can afford to. There were Open Days at Maynooth on Friday and Saturday (28th and 29th November, respectively). These were for prospective students to enter in September 2026. Since I don’t teach any first or second year Physics modules now, and that is likely to continue, it looks like I’ll never see any of that intake in class.
I’m no expert on Autism Diagnosis, but I’m pretty sure that neither “Fexcectorn” nor “frymblal” (medical or otherwise) nor “runctitional” are words in the English language. Why do the person’s legs go through the table? And why is Autism represented by a bicycle? This nonsensical figure was clearly generated by AI, as is much of the text of the paper. How on Earth did this crap pass peer review?
Still, Nature Scientific Reports is indexed in Scopus, which we all know is a watertight guarantee of quality…
P.S. The article was published on 19th November 2025. It is now prefaced by an Editor’s Note: “Readers are alerted that the contents of this paper are subject to criticisms that are being considered by editors. A further editorial response will follow the resolution of these issues.”
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:
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)
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)
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:
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)
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.
Every now and then I get talking over lunch to a distinguished Emeritus Professor at Maynooth University, Tony O’Farrell, about various things. A topic that came up recently was crossword puzzles, which reminded me that I haven’t posted much on that subject for a while. Regular readers of this blog will know that in the past I used to do a lot of crosswords, including the Guardian puzzles almost every day and Azed and Everyman in the Observer on Sundays. Since I moving to Ireland I have weaned myself off the UK newspapers so my regular crossword-solving is nowadays limited to the Times Literary Supplement and Cyclops in Private Eye. Since my TLS subscription has now lapsed, the only one I do regularly is Cyclops.
When I first arrived here almost eight years ago I had a look at the crosswords in the Irish Times. I had a go at the cryptic puzzle – called Crosaire – but didn’t find it particularly challenging (and there’s no prize competition) so never got into the habit of doing it. It’s about the same level of difficulty as Everyman, in my opinion, which I used to do mainly to limber up for Azed. I buy the Weekend Edition on paper and have an online subscription, but rarely look at the crossword.
After chatting with Tony, however, I decided to look at Crosaire again. I had a class test to supervise today so thought I would look at the puzzle that appeared in Saturday’s Weekend Edition as I still had the paper copy. The solution has already been published so I won’t be spoiling anyone’s fun!
Anyway, here is Saturday’s puzzle (obtained from the Irish Times website)
I see that the screen grab misses the clue for 23 across, which is “Say goodbye, thus perish in Australia (5)”. That’s one of the easy clues; the solution is ADIEU. Other easy ones are 18 down (BLT) and 20 across (NUCLEAR)
Overall, it’s a fairly straightforward cryptic puzzle, with conventional wordplay, but there are one or two points of interest.
The first – and this seems to be a trademark – is that the four clues around the perimeter (1 across, 8 down, 9 down and 34 across) are thematically linked. The theme is also sometimes referenced elsewhere. Obviously getting these solutions is an enormous help in completing the grid. When I looked at 1 across I immediately suspected that “Tongue” might mean a language. I then saw an anagram for RIVIERA on 8 down and the starting word “Nice” gave the game away entirely. The four perimeter clues are thus: FRENCH BULLDOG, FRENCH RIVIERA, FRENCH CUISINE and FRENCH TEACHER; 33 down also refers to the French theme.
Other than that I see that there are more ‘hidden word’ type clues than one would normally see in a UK cryptic, such as the clue for NUCLEAR mentioned above. Another one is “Dog shampoo chihuaua drinks (5)” which is “pooch”, although I am not convinced by “drinks” as the indicator!
I also had to think about 14 across “Chart shows Portugal full of Irish (4)”; I thought it had to be PLAN but couldn’t parse the rest until I found out that lán is “full” in the Irish language, hence “full of Irish” with “P” for “Portugal”. I don’t think there are many references to Irish words in Crosaire, generally.
I’m no speed merchant when it comes to crosswords, but this one took me 10 minutes to solve. If you’re interested, the full solution with notes can be found here. Maybe I’ll try to get into the habit of solving this more frequently. That might provide a little compensation for the generally woeful Opinion pieces cluttering up the newspaper. Also, with retirement on my mind, I wonder if the Irish Times – or any other newspaper – is looking for any more setters?
P.S. Crosaire was the pseudonym taken by the original setter John Derek Crozier, as a play on his own name and on the Irish word for “crossroad”. The Irish word for “crossword” is crosfhocal.
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!
Yesterday I came across the old cartoon shown above and shared it on Bluesky. It seemed to cause some amusement so I thought I’d share it here too.
The in-tray reminds me of when I (briefly) worked in industry during the 80s. There was a guy in our large open-plan office who had two trays on his desk, one with a sign marked “IN” and the other with a sign marked “OUT”. Things were delivered on Mondays to the in-trays and collected from out-trays at the end of the day on Fridays. This guy never touched the stuff in his in-tray but just before he left work on Fridays he would swap the signs on the two trays…
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In the Dark 