I found this on Mastodon and, for obvious reasons, couldn’t resist sharing it here:
Working for Elsevier…
Posted in Open Access with tags Elsevier, Publishing on August 29, 2025 by telescoperPrimordial Black Holes in Cosmological Simulations – Update
Posted in Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags arXiv:2506.11233, black holes, primordial black holes on August 28, 2025 by telescoperJust time for a quick update about a paper that I posted about at the start of the summer, when it appeared on arXiv. At that time it had already gained a bit of traction in the media, e.g. here. Well, the paper is now published in the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Obviously, as an author I was conflicted so not involved in the editorial process.
Here is the overlay:
For those of you not in the field, there is currently a big mystery about how galaxies we have found at high redshift with JWST managed to acquire massive black holes so early in the Universe’s evolution. Black holes can grow quickly in a dense environment by accreting mass onto an initial seed, but what are the seeds? In this paper we investigate the possibility that they were primordial black holes. These form directly from fluctuations in the early Universe, as opposed to astrophysical black holes which form from stellar collapse. We don’t know exactly what mass primordial black holes would have nor how numerous they would be, but this paper uses high-resolution numerical experiments to investigate their effects if they do exist.
Here’s a pretty picture which is a zoom into 200 pc of the full simulation. I think 10pc counts as high resolution for a cosmological simulation! The blue circle shows the most massive PBH in the simulation, the green circle shows its nearest neighbour. The colour scale represents the number-density of dark matter particles.
For more details, read the paper!
A Day of Offerings
Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags CAO, CAO offers, Leaving Certificate, Maynooth University, MH101, MH201, MH204, MH206 on August 27, 2025 by telescoperToday (27th August) is the day that students across Ireland receive offers of places at Third-Level Institutions to start next month. The offers for all courses and all institutions are available on the official CAO website here; they are also widely available elsewhere, including this searchable list.
The official numbers for Maynooth are here. Minimum points required for Maynooth’s – and indeed Ireland’s – most important course, MH206 Theoretical Physics and Mathematics, are 520 this year, up a little from 513 last year. MH204 Physics with Astrophysics is 385, up two points on last year’s 383. MH201 General Science (of which Physics is a part) is on 352 points, up two from 350 last year. Just for comparison, the points for these courses from 10 years ago were: MH206 550; MH204 480; and MH201 435, all significantly higher than this year.
Maynooth’s biggest course (by student numbers) – and indeed the biggest course in Ireland reckoned that way – is the Omnibus Arts programme MH101 which has an entry level this year of just 300 CAO points. Ten years ago it was 390.
It seems the first-round entry points for most courses at Maynooth have not changed dramatically despite the reduction in Leaving Certificate grades this year after several years of artificial inflation over the Covid-19 years. Leaving Certificate results are just one factor in determining the CAO points for a particular course at a particular Institution. Overall the picture is rather complex. Across Ireland, points are up for about 50% of courses and down for about 42%. The CAO points needed for a course is largely a matter of demand versus capacity rather than academic performance. For the last few years Maynooth University has been recruiting more and more students, putting pressure on accommodation, teaching loads and campus space. This strategy will prevent any significant rise in CAO points for the foreseeable future. This is probably happening to some extent across the sector, though Maynooth has a more urgent need for more students: to pay for the legions of new managers it has appointed. Two new €100K managerial jobs have been advertised so far this week…
All this just concerns the first round of offers so things may change significantly over the next week or two. Students now have to decide whether to accept their first-round offer or try to change course. They have until next week to do this. Departments won’t know how many new students they have for a while yet.
Update: Thursday 28th August. Here is the traditional Irish Times First Round Offers supplement.
Blu Tack Art
Posted in Art, Maynooth with tags Art, blu tack, sculpture on August 26, 2025 by telescoperMy attention was drawn today to this scuplture which is currently on display in the Department of Physics at Maynooth University. The artist and subject are unknown (to me) and the work is not dated, but the material is clearly Blu Tack, a putty-like pressure-sensitive adhesive commonly used to attach lightweight objects to walls, doors or other dry surfaces.
Five Years at Home in Maynooth
Posted in Biographical, Covid-19, Maynooth with tags Bord na Móna, Covid-19, Greyhound Recycling, Lockdown, Maynooth on August 26, 2025 by telescoperI’ve received a number of bills and renewal notices of various kinds over the last few weeks, indicating the anniversary of me completing the purchase of, and moving into, my house in Maynooth. In fact it was five years ago today that I wrote a blog post occasioned by the fact that I’d collected the keys to this property, though it wasn’t until the following weekend that I actually stayed overnight here for the first time.
I was very lucky to be able to able to buy this property in what turned out to be a short window in the Covid-19 lockdown restrictions in the Summer of 2020. There were plans to return to on-campus teaching in September with drastic restrictions on the number of students in each venue. That plan was subsequently changed and then changed again to move almost all teaching back online, and then again to move again into a “Level 5” lockdown.
I was Head of Department back then. My memories of that time were immense levels of stress and frustration, constantly having to change our teaching arrangements with very little support from the University as well as shouldering a full teaching load. In order for the institution to carry on functioning, all teaching and support staff to do huge amounts of unpaid overtime while the institution built up a massive financial surplus. I could say more about the callous indifference to staff and students alike shown at that time by one particular member of The Management, but I think I had better save it for when I’ve retired.
Given the enormous workload I had then, it was to be almost another year before I had time to collect most of my belongings from my house in Cardiff and longer still before I managed to sell it and pay off the mortgage I took out to buy my house here. All this was much more complicated than I expected when I moved to Ireland!
Anyway, many of the things I’d planned to do when I moved here still aren’t done. I bought some old furniture from the previous owner with the intention of replacing it with new, for example, but I somehow never got round to that. Nor have I replaced the old windows, gutters, etc, yet…
One thing I have done is change the refuse collection. When I moved in I took over a contract with Bord na Móna (literally “The Turf Board”), a company set up in 1946 to supply peat as a form of fuel but now diversified into other activities such as collecting and disposing waste. Over the last year the service provided by this company has degenerated to the point of complete unreliability. When I looked around for a replacement I found that Bord na Móna was also significantly more expensive than its competitors. Earlier this summer, therefore, I swtiched to a company called Greyhound which so far seems much better organized and is about 2/3 the price. That meant I had two sets of wheelie bins cluttering up my garden for about two months until Bord na Móna got around to removing theirs.
Our Million-Dollar Journal!
Posted in Open Access with tags APC, Article Processing Charges, Diamond Open Access, Open Journal of Astrophysics, The Open Journal of Astrophysics on August 25, 2025 by telescoper
The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publishing a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) is now £2356. Converting that to dollars at current rates gives about $3150 per paper.
As of today, 25th August 2025, the Open Journal of Astrophysics has published 359 articles.
Using the dollar cost of an MNRAS APC as a benchmark – many journals charge more – this means that we have now saved the global astrophysics community about $1.1M (for an outlay of around $10K).
Yes, we are still a small journal but the size of that figure should help you understand how much money is being wasted globally on publishing fees that could instead be spent on actual research.
It’s good to see that more and more researchers are seeing the light and switching to Diamond Open Access. Today we published the 124th article in Volume 8 (2025) of the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This means that we have so far in 2025 published more papers than we published in the whole of 2024. At the end of August we will be about two-thirds of the way through the year so I expect we will publish more than 180 articles this year.
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone involved in running this journal: the Editors, staff at Maynooth University Library who help us, the host of volunteer referees, and of course our authors. I’m confident that, together, we can change the publishing landscape in astrophysics, and put the power (and money) back in the hands of researchers instead of greedy publishers.
This is a slightly-edited version of a post I made last week for the Open Journal of Astrophysics blog.
More Google Garbage
Posted in Uncategorized with tags AI nonsense, BBC Proms, Garbage, Google Search on August 24, 2025 by telescoperI couldn’t resist sharing this as part of an occasional series about Google AI Garbage. Earlier this evening (Sunday 24th August 2025), I searched to see if there was a BBC Proms concert this evening. This is what the AI summary produced. I think it’s priceless, right down to the last line!
A Poem by Alice Oswald
Posted in Politics with tags Alice Oswald, Gaza, genocide, Israel, Palestine Action, Poem, Poetry, Sonnet, Spacecraft Voyager 1 on August 24, 2025 by telescoperI was shocked to find out yesterday that the poet (and former Professor of Poetry at Oxford University) Alice Oswald has been arrested under the UK’s draconian anti-terrorism laws at a peaceful protest for holding up a sign supporting Palestine Action, an organization opposed to the ongoing genocide being committed by Israel against the people of Gaza. Among the others arrested were an 89-year old woman and a blind man in a wheelchair. I expect these absurd and unjust actions will achieve the exact opposite of what the Government intended.
Anyway, I am an admirer of the poetry of Alice Oswald. I posted one of her poems here, and have four collections of her poems:
I thought I would post another now to express solidarity with Alice Oswald. This one is from the first of the collections shown above, in which it is simply titled Sonnet, though it is not a form of sonnet I have ever seen before!
Spacecraft Voyager 1 has boldly gone
into Deep Silence carrying a gold-plated disc inscribed with
whale-song
it has bleeped back a last infra-red fragment of language
and floated way way up over the jagged edge
of this almost endless bright and blowy enclosure of weather
to sink through a new texture as tenuous as the soft upward
pressure of an an elevator
and go on and on falling up steep flights of blackness with
increasing swiftness
beyond the Crystalline Cloud of the Dead beyond Plato beyond
Copernicus
O meticulous swivel cameras still registering events
among those homeless spaces gathering in that silence
that hasn't yet had time to speak in that increasing sphere
of tiny runaway stars notched in the year
now you can look closely at massless light
that is said to travel freely but is probably in full flight
by Alice Oswald
Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 23/08/2025
Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags arXiv:2207.03748v5, arXiv:2410.22189v2, arXiv:2502.17556v2, arXiv:2505.22621v2, arXiv:2506.09128v2, arXiv:2506.20505v2, asteroids, common envelope evolution, Cosmology, Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, Diamond Open Access, Diamond Open Acess Publishing, Earth and Planetary Astrophysics, Gaia DR3, Habitability, High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, Neural Differential Equations, Open Journal of Astrophysics, planetesimals, power spectra, rubble piles, Solar and Stellar Astrophysics, Symbiotic Stars, The Open Journal of Astrophysics, Transition Metals, white dwarfs on August 23, 2025 by telescoperSo it’s Saturday again, so it’s time for the usual update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics which I do every Saturday. Since the last update we have published six new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 122, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 357. As I mentioned here we have overtaken the total of 120 published in Volume 7 (2024) and are on track for in excess of 180 publications in 2025.
The first paper to report this week is “Mass-feeding of jet-launching white dwarfs in grazing and common envelope evolution” by Noam Soker (Technion, Haifa, Israel). This was published on Tuesday 19th August in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. It proposes a theoretical suggestion about the production of jets in common-envelope evolution with massive stars.
The overlay is here:
You can make this larger by clicking on it, as you can with all the overlays below. The officially accepted version of this paper can be found on the arXiv here.
The second paper this week, published on Wednesday 20th August in the folder Earth and Planetary Astrophysics, is “Transition metal abundance as a key parameter for the search of Life in the Universe” by Giovanni Covone and Donato Giovannelli (University of Naples, Italy). This paper presents an argument that the availability of transition elements is an essential feature of habitability, and should be considered as such in selecting exoplanetary targets in the search for life.
The overlay is here:
You can find the officially accepted version of the paper on arXiv here.
The third paper this week, also published on 20th August 2025 in the folder Earth and Planetary Astrophysics, is “Discrete element simulations of self-gravitating rubble pile collisions: the effects of non-uniform particle size and rotation” by Job Guidos, Lucas Kolanz and Davide Lazzati (Oregon State University, USA). This presents a new computer code for simulating the growth of granular masses through collisions of smaller particles and discusses results generated by it.
The overlay for this one is here:
You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.
The next paper, the fourth this week, is “Seeing the Outer Edge of the Infant Type Ia Supernova 2024epr in the Optical and Near Infrared” by W.B. Hoogendam (University of Hawaii, USA) and 32 others – too numerous to list by name – based in various institutes in the USA, Australia, UK, Denmark, Taiwan and China. This paper was also published on Wednesday 20th August 2025, but in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. The article reports on the results of optical-to-near-infrared photometry and spectroscopy of the Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) 2024epr and a discusses how these challenge models for this sort of supernova.
The overlay is here:
You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.
The fifth paper this week is “Computing Nonlinear Power Spectra Across Dynamical Dark Energy Model Space with Neural ODEs” by Peter L. Taylor of Ohio State University (USA). This one shows how to compute the evolution of cosmological power spectra into the non-linear regime via neural differential equations. It was published on Friday 22nd August 2025 in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. The overlay is here:
You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.
And finally for this week we have “Symbiotic star candidates in Gaia Data Release 3” by Samantha E. Ball & Benjamin C Bromley (University of Utah, USA) and Scott J. Kenyon (Smithsonian Observatory, USA). This paper was published on Friday 22nd August in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. It describes a new search for symbiotic star candidates in Gaia Data Release 3 (GDR3), based on astrometric, photometric, and spectroscopic information. The overlay is here:
You can find the officially accepted version of this one on arXiv here.
And that’s all the papers for this week. I suppose there will come a time when we publish a paper on every day of the week and each week’s summary will contain a paper in each of the astro-ph categories on arXiv, but we haven’t done that yet. This week we published on every day but Monday 18th August, and have papers in four of the six categories.
Moving On
Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags Aoibhinn Gallagher, CAO, Central Admissions Office, Examination Boards, Leaving Certificate, Leaving Certificate 2025, Maynooth University, PhD on August 22, 2025 by telescoperLast week I wrote a post about the loose ends of the academic year, one of which concerned my PhD student Aoibhinn, who passed her viva voce examination way back in May, who had to submit a bound copy of the thesis to the relevant office by September 6th so that her degree could be ratified by Faculty and Academic Council. She has now done that, and in the process kindly made me an extra copy of the Authorized Version to put on my shelf:
It will be easy to find on my shelf because it’s a different colour from the others. Aoibhinn will be off to Germany for a postdoctoral fellowship after her conferring ceremony in October.
In subsequent post I mentioned a plethora of meetings to take place this week, all of which went off without much incident. The various Departmental Examination Boards did their business and students will receive their results on September 5th. Students involved in these will be moving on in various ways: some will be graduating, some progressing to the next year of their course and others – though not very many at all – will be leaving without qualifying.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Ireland, students in the Class of 25 have today been receiving their school Leaving Certificate results. As expected, the proportion at the highest grade (H1) is down significantly compared 2024. On the other hand, the total number of students taking Leaving Certificate examinations is significantly higher than last year. You can find all the national statistics here.
How these nationwide effects will work their way through to undergraduate admissions at Maynooth remains to be seen. Applicants will get offers through the CAO system next week; the points required by each higher education institution should be available online on Wednesday 27th. The Irish Times traditionally publishes a pull-out supplement showing all the offers for all courses at all universities across the sector the following day, i.e. on Thursday 28th September.
By the end of next week, therefore, we’ll have some sort of an idea how many students we will have entering the University in September 2025 and can begin moving on to the next academic year. One thing I’ve already got sorted out – way ahead of previous years – is my teaching timetable for Semester 1. Usually I’ve been happy if I had this before the first week of term! My new timetable makes Tuesdays and Thursdays my heaviest teaching days, but gives me Wednesday free for research and other things that I’ve started planning already.
In the Dark 