A few months ago I posted about a joint initiative between Euclid and Galaxy Zoo that involved engaging members of the public in a project involving galaxy morphology. Well, a new “collab” (as you young people call such things) has just been announced on social media, and I encourage you to investigate further
The new venture is called `Space Warps – ESA Euclid’, and its aim is to find strong gravitational lenses in Euclid survey images. You can find out more about this project in this blog post by Knud Jahnke and you can find instructions and sign up for the project here.
The announcement of this initiative gives me an opportunity to pass on a little update on progress with the Euclid survey. The first `Quick’ Data Release (known to its friends as Q1) was made available to Euclid Consortium members just a few weeks ago. This will be made available to the general public next March, around the same time as the joint ESLAB and Euclid Consortium meeting in Leiden next year.
The Euclid survey is constructed as a set of contiguous `tiles’ covering the survey region, which will ultimately be about 15,000 square degrees (about one-third of the sky), with most of the region scanned by the satellite many times. The Q1 data will just be a taster of this. The main component of the Q1 data relates to a single visit (at the depth of the Euclid Wide Survey) over the Euclid Deep Fields (EDFs): 20 deg2 of the EDF North, 10 deg2 of EDF Fornax, and 23 deg2 of the EDF South. The deep fields will subsequently be visited multiple times during the mission. The Q1 release will be of Level 2 data, i.e. data at the level of individual tiles.
The first full data release (DR1) is due to be published in June 2026.
The arrival of my polling card yesterday indicates that the general election in Ireland on Friday 29th November is approaching rapidly, so I thought I’d give a rundown of the 16 candidates who will appear on the ballot paper for my constituency, Kildare North.
Kildare North will return 5 TDs (Teachta Dála, or Deputies), one more than last time because of the population growth in the area. The current TDs are Réada Cronin (SF; Sinn Féin), Bernard Durkan (FG; Fine Gael), James Lawless (FF; Fianna Fáil) and Catherine Murphy (SD; Social Democrats). The latter is retiring so will not be standing at this election. The current government is a coalition of FG, FF and Green Party TDs.
The Single Transferable Vote system is used, meaning that voters have a single ballot paper on which they rank the candidates in order of preference. The candidate with the lowest number of first-preference votes is eliminated and their second preference votes redistributed. Candidates are thus progressively eliminated until the requisite number of TDs is selected.
There are three FG candidates: Bernard Durkan, Joe Neville and Evie Sammon). They are based in Maynooth, Leixlip and Celbridge respectively so are presumably hoping that local voting will work out in their favour. The idea presumably is that Bernard Durkan would be first choice in Maynooth, etc. However, I’ve already had canvassers arguing that I should put Joe Neville first. I won’t be voting for any of the candidates anyway, but I would be very amused if their decision to put three candidates forward backfired. Incidentally, Bernard Durkan is 79 and has been a TD since 1982. The leaflet I got from him promised “New Energy” for Kildare North. Yeah, right…
There are two FF candidates, James Lawless and Naoise Ó Cearúil; the latter was elected to the County Council this summer. I find FF indistinguishable from FG. Together or separately these two parties have governed the Republic since its creation and a change is long overdue.
The two Sinn Féin candidates are the incumbent Réada Cronin and Caroline Hogan. I haven’t seen any posters for Réada Cronin up in Maynooth, so I assume the campaign team is saving their resources for elsewhere. Maynooth is not traditionally an SF stronghold.
With Catherine Murphy not standing, the Social Democrats ran a process to select a replacement candidate, which was won by Aidan Farrelly (who actually works at Maynooth University) who is the official SD candidate. That doesn’t end the story, however. Former SD member Bill Clear is standing as an Independent because he didn’t get selected. Adding to the fact that Catherine Murphy had a considerable personal following, this looks like a bit of a mess for the Social Democrats whose vote will probaboly be reduced and split. It may be in order to capitalize on this that SF added a candidate; they only fielded one last time round.
Now we’re into the (probable) also-rans. Angela Feeney is standing for Labour. She is an active member of the Council, representing Maynooth, but it’s not clear whether she has reach over the rest of the constituency. Vincent Martin represents the Greens who haven’t previously been strong here. The Green Party in Ireland is nowhere near as left-wing as corresponding parties in the UK and elsewere. It often seems like the bicycle division of Fine Gael. Leah Whelan is standing for People Before Profit – Solidarity, the only really left-wing party standing in Kildare North.
Then we have we have a number of generally disagreeable (to me) fringe party candidates: Una O’Connor is standing for Aontú, a reactionary splinter group of people previously in Sinn Féin and Sean Gill for the Centre Party of Ireland, an ironic name for what is far-right splinter group of FG previously known as Renua. Gerry Waters is standing from the Irish Freedom Party. He was struck off the medical register for refusing to administer vaccines and has unsupportable far-right opinions on other issues. Last and by all means least is Avril Corcoran who is candidate for The Irish People, a far-right nationalist party which is part of the National Alliance of like-minded bigots.
It’s probably obvious which 11 candidates I’m not going to be voting for, but I’ll leave you to guess in what order I will rank the other 5!
It’s Saturday morning so it’s time for the usual weekly update of publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This week’s report will be short because there is only one paper to report this week, being the 105th paper in Volume 7 (2024) and the 220th altogether. It was published on Wednesday 19th November 2024.
The title of the latest paper is”Early Bright Galaxies from Helium Enhancements in High-Redshift Star Clusters” and the authors are Harley Katz (U. Chicago), Alexander P. Ji (U. Chicago), Grace Telford (Princeton) & Peter Senchyna (Carnegie Observatories), all based in the USA. This paper, which is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies, discusses chemical abundance – specfically Helium enhancement – as a factor in the luminosity of high-redshift galaxies
Here is the overlay of the paper containing the abstract:
You can click on the image of the overlay to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can also find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.
That’s all for this week – tune in next Saturday for next week’s update!
We have a visiting speaker for a colloquium this afternoon in the form of Dr Martin Rey, formerly of Oxford University and now a lecturer at the University of Bath. Last night at dinner I learned that he has a YouTube channel called Cosmic Rey (geddit?) so I thought I’d share one of the videos here.
The paper relating to this video can be found on the arXiv here.
We’re about two-thirds of the way into the Autumn Semester here at Maynooth and, by a miracle, I’m just about on schedule with both the modules I’m teaching. It’s always difficult to work out how long things are going to need for explanation when you’re teaching them for the first time.
One of the modules I’m doing is Differential Equations and Transform Methods for Engineering Students. I’ve been on the bit following the “and” for a couple of weeks already. The first transform method covered was the Laplace transform, which I remember doing as a physics undergraduate but have used only rarely. Now I’m doing Fourier Series, as a prelude to Fourier transforms.
As I have observed periodically, the differential equations and transform methods are not at all disconnected, but are linked via the heat equation, the solution of which led Joseph Fourier to devise his series in Mémoire sur la propagation de la chaleur dans les corps solides (1807), a truly remarkable work for its time that inspired so many subsequent developments.
In the module I’m teaching, the applications are rather different from when I taught Fourier series to Physics students. Engineering students at Maynooth primarily study electronic engineering and robotics, so there’s a much greater emphasis on using integral transforms for signal processing. The mathematics is the same, of course, but some of the terminology is different from that used by physicists.
Anyway I was looking for nice demonstrations of Fourier series to help my class get to grips with them when I remembered this little video recommended to me some time ago by esteemed Professor George Ellis. It’s a nice illustration of the principles of Fourier series, by which any periodic function can be decomposed into a series of sine and cosine functions.
This reminds me of a point I’ve made a few times in popular talks about astronomy. It’s a common view that Kepler’s laws of planetary motion according to which which the planets move in elliptical motion around the Sun, is a completely different formulation from the previous Ptolemaic system which involved epicycles and deferents and which is generally held to have been much more complicated.
The video demonstrates however that epicycles and deferents can be viewed as the elements used in the construction of a Fourier series. Since elliptical orbits are periodic, it is perfectly valid to present them in the form of a Fourier series. Therefore, in a sense, there’s nothing so very wrong with epicycles. I admit, however, that a closed-form expression for such an orbit is considerably more compact and elegant than a Fourier representation, and also encapsulates a deeper level of physical understanding. What makes for a good physical theory is, in my view, largely a matter of economy: if two theories have equal predictive power, the one that takes less chalk to write it on a blackboard is the better one!
Anyway, soon I’ll be moving onto the complex Fourier series and thence to Fourier transforms which is familiar territory, but I have to end the module with the Z-transform, which I have never studied and never used. That should be fun!
The Mayall Telescope at Kitt Peak, in which DESI is housed. This PR image was taken during a meteor shower, which is not ideal observing conditions. Picture Credit: KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/R. Sparks
I’ve just got time between meetings to mention that a clutch of brand new papers has emerged from the DESI (Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument) Collaboration. There is a press release discussing the results from the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory here and one from the ICCUB in Barcelona here; several members of the group I visited there during sabbatical are working on DESI. Congratulations to them.
I haven’t had time to read them yet, but a quick skim suggests that the results are consistent with the standard cosmological model.
The latest batch contains three Key Publications:
DESI Collaboration et al., DESI 2024 II: Sample Definitions, Characteristics, and Two-point Clustering Statistics
Findlay et al. (2024), Exploring HOD-dependent systematics for the DESI 2024 Full-Shape galaxy clustering analysis
The links lead to the arXiv version of these papers. These articles can also be found, along with previously released publications by the DESI Collaboration, here.
Anyone who has read the latest papers is welcome to comment through the box below!
Posted in Biographical on November 19, 2024 by telescoper
I got one of these earlier today.
It hasn’t really been a ‘spike’ because it’s carried on all day. As of now (about 10pm local Irish time), I’ve had over 7,000 hits today. That’s a lot more than average!
The weird thing is that the traffic isn’t all arriving at the same post, so I’ve no idea what triggered this surge. All I know is that most of the readers are based in the USA.
It’s a mystery!
Another interesting thing is that all those hits are coming from just a few hundred unique visitors. It could, therefore, be that all the extra traffic is from one site, in which case it might be someone scraping the content for AI purposes…
Update: the blitz lasted three days. Notice how the number of visitors did not go up, only the number of reads.
It has been an unusually mild November until today, when it has suddenly turned colder and wetter. This alteration does not seem to have pleased Maynooth University Library Cat.
Just a quick post to point out that today is LGBTQIA+ STEM Day, which aims to celebrate to celebrate the work of LGBTQIA+ people in science, technology, engineering, and maths (STEM), but also to highlight the barriers still facing us.
The Open Journal of Astrophysics is now reasonably well established as a Diamond Open Access journal for the astrophysics community. We have published over a hundred articles so far this year at such a low cost that we can make our publications free to read and to publish. Thanks for all this is due to the volunteers on our Editorial Board, the excellent team at Maynooth University library, who have supported this project for 6 years, to the arXiv, as well of course to the authors who have chosen to publish with us.
Although we have established a good base, we’re still much smaller than the mainstream journals publishing just a few percent of their output. There is no sign of a slowdown at OJAp. Indeed there are signs that pace will pick up. I heard last week, for example, that Oxford University Press (the publisher of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society) has decided to cancel the ‘Read-and-Publish’ agreement that allowed authors from Australian institutions to avoid APCs. I imagine we’ll get quite a few more submissions from Down Under thanks to that decision.
Nevertheless, we’ve a long way to go to catch up with the likes of A&A, MNRAS and ApJ in terms of numbers. If activity continues to grow then we will incur greater costs – our provider, Scholastica, charges us per paper. Those costs will still be smaller than regular journals, but I think it’s unfair that the expense of running a journal that serves the global astrophysics community should fall entirely on one small University in Ireland.
Expense is only one issue. I never envisaged that OJAp would be unique. It was more intended to be a proof of concept. I would like to see a range of Diamond Open Access journals offering a choice for authors and serving different sub-disciplines. Most universities nowadays have publishing operations so there could be network of federated journals, some based on arXiv and some based on other repositories. Perhaps institutions are worried about the expense but, as we have shown the actual cost, is far less than they are wasting on Article Processing Charges. I rather think it’s not the money that is the issue, just the unimaginatively risk-averse thinking in what passes these days for university management.
There are two simple – but not mutually exclusive – possibilities.
One is that astrophysics institutions club together and donate funds not only to keep OJAp going, but also to allow us to invest in improvements. A donation equivalent to the cost of just one APC for a typical journal would help us enormously. We do actually get some donations already, but more would always be welcome. In the long run, an investment in Diamond Open Access would pay back many times in savings; OJAp has already saved the worldwide community over £500,000.
The other is that other members of the community follow the lead of OJAp and set up their own journals. I wouldn’t see others as much as competitors, more as allies with community-led federated system. In the light of the OUP decision mentioned above, why don’t Australian research institutions set up their own version of OJAp? I’d be happy to discuss how to start up such a journal with anyone interested.
If you would like to discuss either of these possibilities please use the comment box below or email me here.
P.S. There is another issue concerning the future of OJAp, which is that I will be retiring in a few years, but now isn’t the time to discuss that one!
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In the Dark 