Archive for Astrophysics of Galaxies

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 14/06/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 14, 2025 by telescoper

It’s Saturday so once again it’s time for the weekly update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published two new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 71, and the total so far published by OJAp  is now up to 306.

The two papers published this week, with their overlays, are as follows. You can click on the images of the overlays to make them larger should you wish to do so.

The first paper to report is “Analysis of optical spectroscopy and photometry of the type I X-ray bursting system UW CrB2” by Mark Kennedy (University College Cork, Ireland) and 21 others based in Ireland, UK, USA, Finland, Netherlands and Australia. This one was published on Tuesday June 10th in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena.  This describes optical photometry and spectroscopy of the low-mass X-ray binary UW Coronae Borealis taken over 2 years

The overlay is here:

 

 

You can read the final accepted version on arXiv here.

The second paper is “The Impact of Feedback-driven Outflows on Bar Formation” by Martin D. Weinberg (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA). This paper uses a generalization of the Hamiltonian Mean-Field model to of the disruption of bar formation in galaxies by stellar feedback. It was published on Friday 13th June 2025 in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies.

The overlay is here:

 

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

That’s all the papers for this week. I’ll post another update next weekend.

 

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 07/06/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on June 7, 2025 by telescoper

It’s Saturday so once again it’s time for the weekly update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published two new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 69 and the total so far published by OJAp  is now up to 304.

The two papers published this week, with their overlays, are as follows. You can click on the images of the overlays to make them larger should you wish to do so.

The first paper to report is “Chemical Abundances in the Leiptr Stellar Stream: A Disrupted Ultra-faint Dwarf Galaxy?” by Kaia R. Atzberger (Ohio State University) and 13 others based in the USA, Germany, the UK, Sweden, Australia, Canada and Brazil. This one was published on 2nd June 2025 and is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies. It presents a spectroscopic study of stars in a stellar stream suggesting that the stream originated by the accretion of a dwarf galaxy by the Milky Way.

The overlay is here:

 

You can read the final accepted version on arXiv here.

The second paper is “Scaling Laws for Emulation of Stellar Spectra” by Tomasz Różański (Australian Nastional University) and Yuan-Sen Ting (Ohio State University, USA). This was published yesterday, i.e. on 6th June 2025, and is in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. The paper discusses certain scaling models and their use to achieve optimal performance for neural network emulators in the inference of stellar parameters and element abundances from spectroscopic data.

The overlay is here:

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

That’s the papers for this week. I’ll post another update next weekend.

As a postscript I have a small announcement about our social media. Owing to the imminent demise of Astrodon, we have moved the Mastodon profile of the Open Journal of Astrophysics to a new instance, Fediscience. You can find us here. The old profile currently redirects to the new one, but you might want to update your links as the old server will eventually go offline.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 17/05/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 17, 2025 by telescoper

It’s a lovely Saturday morning in May, and it’s time for the weekly  update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published four new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 59 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 294.

In chronological order of publication, the four papers published this week, with their overlays, are as follows. You can click on the images of the overlays to make them larger should you wish to do so.

The first paper to report is: “Multi-Phase Thermal Structure & The Origin of the Broad-Line Region, Torus, and Corona in Magnetically-Dominated Accretion Disks” by Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech, USA). This was published on Monday May 12th in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It presents simple accretion disk model that predicts the properties of many features including the dusty torus, broad-line region, continuum emission and coronal gas.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

Second one up is “Sparsity covariance: a source of uncertainty when estimating correlation functions with a discrete sample of observations in the sky” by Pierre Fleury (U. Montpellier, France). This one was published on Tuesday 13th May 2025 in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics.  This paper presents a discussion of the uncertainty in cosmological observables caused by discrete sampling and a method to compute the covariances resulting from this.

The overlay is here:

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

The third paper of the week, published on Wednesday May 14th 2025,  is “Dark Matter Particle Flux in a Dynamically Self-consistent Milky Way Model” by Lucijana Stanic, Mark Eberlein, Stanislav Linchakovskyy, Christopher Magnoli, Maryna Mesiura, Luca Morf, Prasenjit Saha (University of Zurich, Switzerland) and Eugene Vasiliev (University of Surrey, UK). This one presents a study of the behaviour of dark matter in an anisotropic model for the Milky Way halo with implications for particle detection rates. It is in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies.

Here is the overlay:

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

The last paper published this week is “Too fast to be single: Tidal evolution and photometric identification of stellar and planetary companions” by Ilay Kamai and Hagai B. Perets (Technion, Haifa, Israel). This one was published on Friday 16th May 2025 in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. It presents an analysis of the rotation of stars observed in the Kepler field to identify non-single systems with high spin rates resulting from tidal effects.

Here is the overlay:

The official published version can be found on the arXiv here.

That’s all the papers for this week. I’ll post another update next week.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 03/05/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 3, 2025 by telescoper

Saturday morning once again, and time for another update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. It’s been a recording-breaking week: since the last update we have published no fewer than ten papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 54 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 289.

The first paper to report is “Subspace Approximations to the Focused Transport Equation of Energetic Particles, I. The Standard Form” by B. Kippenstein & A. Shalchi (U. Manitoba, Canada). This paper, which was published on Monday 28th April 2025, presents a hybrid analytical-numerical method to solve the Fokker-Planck equation for the transport of energetic particles. It is published in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

Next is “The Importance of Subtleties in the Scaling of the ‘Terminal Momentum’ For Galaxy Formation Simulations” by Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech, USA). This presents a technical discussion of issues surrounding the proper modelling of supernova blast waves and their effects in numerical simulations of galaxy formation. It was published on Tuesday 29th April 2025 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The overlay is here:

The final version can be found on arXic here.

Next one up is “Local variations of the radial metallicity gradient in a simulated NIHAO-UHD Milky Way analogue and their implications for (extra-)galactic studies” by Sven Buder (ANU, Australia), Tobias Buck (U. Heidelberg, Germany), Qian-Hui Chen (ANU) and Kathryn Grasha (ANU). This one was also published on Tuesday 29th April 2025 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It describes a numerical study of the variation of chemical abundance with radial position in galaxies and the implications of this for galaxy formation. Here is the overlay:

and you can find the final accepted version on arXiv here.

The fourth paper this week is “Zooming In On The Multi-Phase Structure of Magnetically-Dominated Quasar Disks: Radiation From Torus to ISCO Across Accretion Rates” by Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech, USA) and 14 others based in the USA and Canada. This was also published on Tuesday 29th April 2025 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It presents very detailed numerical study of the structure of magnetized quasar accretion disks. The overlay is here:

You can find the official final version on arXiv here.

Next is “Tomographic halo model of the unWISE-Blue galaxies using cross-correlations with BOSS CMASS galaxies” by Alex Krolewski, Jensen Lawrence, and Will J. Percival (U. Waterloo, Canada). This one was also published on 29th April 2025, which was a busy day(!), but in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics.  This paper describes using the halo model to create mock samples unWISE-Blue galaxies, applicable to other tomographic cross-correlations between photometric samples and narrowly-binned spectroscopic samples. The overlay is here:

The final version of this one can be found on the arXiv here.

Number six for this week is “StratLearn-z: Improved photo-estimation from spectroscopic data subject to selection effects” by Chiara Moretti (SISSA, Trieste, Italy), Maximilian Autenrieth (Imperial College, UK), Riccardo Serra (SISSA), Roberto Trotta (SISSA), David A. van Dyk (Imperial) and Andrei Mesinger (SNS Pisa, Italy). This was published on Thursday 1st May 2025 in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. This one is about estimating photometric redshifts using an approach that relies on splitting the source and target datasets into strata based on estimated propensity score. The overlay is here:

 

The official version can be found on arXiv here.

Next is “The Impact of Galaxy-halo Size Relations on Galaxy Clustering Signals” by Joshua B. Hill and Yao-Yuan Mao (U. Utah, USA). This one was also published on May 2nd 2025 and is in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It discusses the challenge of identifying a specific galaxy halo property that controls galaxy sizes through constraints from galaxy clustering alone. The overlay is here:

You can find the official version of the paper on arXiv here.

The next paper is “Detection of Thermal Emission at Millimeter Wavelengths from Low-Earth Orbit Satellites” by Allen Foster (Princeton, USA) and an international cast of 90 others, which is too many to list individually. This one was also published on Thursday May 1st but is in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics.  The paper discusses the experimental detection of thermal emission from satellites and a discussion of the implications for astrophysical observations, especially time-domain astronomy. The overlay is here:

You can find the final version of the paper on arXiv here.

The penultimate paper of this week is “Pseudo-Cls for spin-s fields with component-wise weighting” by David Alonso (U. Oxford, UK). This one was published yesterday (Friday 2nd May 2025).  The paper presents an approach to power spectrum estimation appropriate for data with anisotropic noise properties or for which complicated masks are required.  It can be found in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. The overlay is here:

 

The final version of this paper is on arXiv here.

The last paper this week is “The past, present and future of observations of externally irradiated disks” by Planet formation environments collaboration: Megan Allen (U. Sheffield, UK) and 52 others. This paper was published on Friday 2nd May in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics.  It presents a review of research on the effects of the ultraviolet radiation environment on protoplanetary disc evolution and planet formation. The overlay is here:

You can find the final version on arXiv here.

That’s all the papers for this week. I’ll just add that there were quite a few gremlins at Crossref this week, particularly yesterday. I usually do the publishing first thing in the morning but yesterday’s papers were held in a queue for most of the day pending registration. Usually it just takes a few minutes, but for these I had to wait several hours but we got there in the end. Although ten papers is more than we have ever published in a week, we still haven’t had a week in which we’ve published on every working day!

Anyway, that’s all for this week. I’ll post another update next Saturday.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 26/04/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on April 26, 2025 by telescoper

It’s Satuday morning once again, and time for another update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published two papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 44 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 279.

The first paper to report is “Approximating non-Gaussian Bayesian partitions with normalising flows: statistics, inference and application to cosmology” by Tobias Röspel, Adrian Schlosser & Björn Malte Schäfer (Universität Heidelberg, Germany) which was published on April 23rd 2025 in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. It is an introduction to normalizing flows – a machine learning technique for transforming distributions – and its application to the extraction of cosmological parameters from supernova data.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

The other paper this week is “Dwarf Galaxies in the TNG50 Field: connecting their Star-formation Rates with their Environments” by Joy Bhattacharyya & Annika H.G. Peter (Ohio State University, USA) and Alexie Leauthaud (UC Santa Cruz, USA).  This one was published on 24th April 2025 in the older Astrophysics of Galaxies and it studies dwarf galaxies with properties similar to the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds that form in different environments in the TNG50 simulation of the IllustrisTNG project.

The overlay is here:

 

and you can find the final accepted version on arXiv here.

 

That’s all for this week. I’ll have another update next Saturday.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 12/04/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 12, 2025 by telescoper

Time for the weekly Saturday morning update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published four new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 37 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 272.

In chronological order of publication, the four papers published this week, with their overlays, are as follows. You can click on the images of the overlays to make them larger should you wish to do so.

The first paper to report is “Searching for new physics using high precision absorption spectroscopy; continuum placement uncertainties and the fine structure constant in strong gravity” by Chung-Chi Lee (Big Questions Institute (BQI), Sydney, Australia), John K. Webb (Cambridge, UK), Darren Dougan (BQI), Vladimir A. Dzuba & Victor V. Flambaum (UNSW, Australia) and Dinko Milaković (Trieste, Italy).

This presents a discussion of the problem of continuum placement in high-resolution spectroscopy, which impacts significantly on fine structure constant measurements, and a method for mitigating its effects. The paper is in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics and was published on Tuesday 8th April 2025. The overlay is here:

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

The second paper to announce, also published on 8th April 2025,  is “Deciphering Spatially Resolved Lyman-Alpha Profiles in Reionization Analogs: The Sunburst Arc at Cosmic Noon” by Erik Solhaug (Chicago, USA), Hsiao-Wen Chen (Chicago), Mandy C. Chen (Chicago),  Fakhri Zahedy (University of North Texas),  Max Gronke (MPA Garching, Germany),  Magdalena J. Hamel-Bravo (Swinburne, Australia), Matthew B. Bayliss (U. Cincinatti), Michael D. Gladders  (Chicago), Sebastián López (Universidad de Chile), Nicolás Tejos (Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile).

This paper, which presents a study of the Lyman-alpha emission properties of a gravitationally-lensed galaxy at redshift z=2.37, appears in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It was published

 

 

 

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

The third paper of the week  is “On the progenitor of the type Ia supernova remnant 0509-67.5” by Noam Soker (Technion, Haifa, Israel). This one was published on Wednesday 9th April 2025 in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. The author discusses possible ideas for the origin of a supernova that exploded inside a planetary nebula.

Here is the overlay:

 

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

Last (but certainly) not least for this week, published on April 11th 2025, we have “Are Models of Strong Gravitational Lensing by Clusters Converging or Diverging?” by Derek Perera (U. Minnesota), John H Miller Jr & Liliya L. R. Williams (U. Minnesota, USA), Jori Liesenborgs (Hasselt U., Belgium), Allison Keen (U. Minnesota), Sung Kei Li (Hong Kong University), Marceau Limousin (Aix Marseille Univ., France).  This papers study various models of a strong gravitational lensing system, the results suggesting that lens models are neither converging to nor diverging from a common solution for this system, regardless of method.

Here is the overlay:

 

 

The official published version can be found on the arXiv here.

 

That’s all the papers for this week. By way of a postscript I’ll just mention that the gremlins that have affected submissions to Crossref (which we rely on for registering the article metadata) have now been resolved and normal services have been restored.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 05/04/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on April 5, 2025 by telescoper

It’s time once more for the regular Saturday morning update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published one new paper. The number of articles in Volume 8 (2025) is now up to 33 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 268.

The paper concerned, published on 2nd April 2025, is “The molecular gas content throughout the low-z merger sequence” by Mark T. Sargent (ISSI, Bern), S. L. Ellison (U. Victoria, Canada), J. T. Mendel (ANU), A. Saintonge (UCL), D. Cs. Molnár & T. Schwandt (U. Sussex), J. M. Scudder (Oberlin College, USA) and G. Violino (U. Hertfordshire). It is published in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies and it discusses the observed properties of molecular gas in post-merger galaxies and interacting pairs and the physical origin of these properties.

Here is the overlay:

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

That’s all for this week. I’ll do another update next Saturday.

Weekly Update at the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 22/03/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 22, 2025 by telescoper

It’s Satuday morning once again, and time for another update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published two papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 29 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 264.

The papers we have published this week are connected by the theme of black holes and their role in galaxy formation, which is a very hot topic nowadays!

The first paper to report is “Hawking Radiation from non-evaporating primordial black holes cannot enable the formation of direct collapse black holes” by Jonathan Regan, Marios Kalomenopoulos and Kelly Kosmo O’Neil of the University of Nevada, USA. This paper, which is based on an undergraduate thesis, is a study of the irradiating effects of primordial black holes and a discussion of whether these might influence the subsequent formation of supermassive black holes. It is in the section marked Astrophysics of Galaxies, and was published on Tuesday  18th March.

The overlay is here:

and you can find the final accepted version on arXiv here.

The second paper, which was published on Wednesday 19th March and is also in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “First Light and Reionization Epoch Simulations (FLARES) – XV: The physical properties of super-massive black holes and their impact on galaxies in the early universe” by Stephen Wilkins & Jussi K. Kuusisto (U. Sussex, UK), Dimitrios Irodotou (Institute of Cancer Research, UK), Shihong Liao (Beijing, China) Christopher C. Lovell (Portsmouth, UK), Sonja Soininen (Insitute of Cancer Research), Sabrina C. Berger (Melbourne, Australia), Sophie L. Newman (Portsmouth, UK), William J. Roper (Sussex), Louise T. C. Seeyave (Sussex), Peter A. Thomas (Sussex) and Aswin P. Vijayan Sussex). This paper uses cosmological hydrodynamical zoom simulations to study the formation of supermassive black holes and their impact on star formation in the early Universe.

Here is the overlay, which you can click on to make larger if you wish:

 

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

That’s all for this week. It’s been a bit frustrating for me as Managing Ediutor, because we have built up a backlog of several papers that were accepted for publication some time ago, but are still waiting for the authors to place the final version on arXiv. I hope these won’t take too long to appear, not least because I would like to clear my workflow on the Scholastica platform!

Weekly Update at the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 15/03/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 15, 2025 by telescoper

The Ideas of March are come, so it’s time for another update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published two papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 27 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 262.

The first paper to report is “Dark Energy Survey Year 6 Results: Point-Spread Function Modeling” by Theo Schutt and 59 others distributed around the world, on behalf of the DES Collaboration. It was published on Wednesday March 12th 2025 in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. It discusses the improvements made in modelling the Point Spread Function (PSF) for weak lensing measurements in the latest Dark Energy Survey (6-year) data and prospects for the future.

Here is the overlay, which you can click on to make larger if you wish:

 

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

The other paper published this week is “Exploring Symbolic Regression and Genetic Algorithms for Astronomical Object Classification” by Fabio Ricardo Llorella (Universidad Internacional de la Rioja, Spain) & José Antonio Cebrian (Universidad Laboral de Córdoba, Spain), which came out on Thursday 13th March. This one is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies and it discusses the classification of astronomical objects in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey SDSS-17 dataset using a combination of Symbolic Regressiion and Genetic Algorithms.

The overlay can be seen here:

You can find the “final” version on arXiv here.

That’s it for this week. I’ll have more papers to report next Saturday.