Archive for Astrophysics of Galaxies

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 22/02/2025

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

It’s Saturday morning again so it’s time for an update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Things have picked up a bit after a quiet couple of weeks. Since the last update we have published four new papers which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 18 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 253.

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 in fact our 250th paper:  “Untangling Magellanic Streams” by Dennis Zaritsky (Steward Observatory), Vedant Chandra (Harvard), Charlie Conroy (Harvard), Ana Bonaca (Carnegie Observatories), Phillip A. Cargile (Harvard), and Rohan P. Naidu (MIT), all based in the USA. This paper is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies and it reports on spectroscopic study aimed at teasing out the stellar populations of different strands of the Magellanic Stream. It was published on Tuesday 18th February 2025. Here is the overlay:

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

The second paper of the week  is “Compressed ‘CMB-lite’ Likelihoods Using Automatic Differentiation” by Lennart Balkenhol (Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, France) which was one of two papers published on Wednesday 19th February. It appears in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics and it describes an implementation of the CMB-lite framework relying on automatic differentiation to reduce the computational cost of the lite likelihood construction.  The overlay is here:

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

The next paper, also published on Wednesday 19th February in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics is “Bayesian distances for quantifying tensions in cosmological inference and the surprise statistic” by Benedikt Schosser (Heidelberg, Germany), Pedro Riba Mello & Miguel Quartin (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and Bjoern Malte Schaefer (Heidelberg).  It presents a discussion of statistical divergences applied to posterior distributions following from different data sets and their use in quantifying discrepancies or tensions.

Here is the overlay:

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

Finally in this batch we have “Precise and Accurate Mass and Radius Measurements of Fifteen Galactic Red Giants in Detached Eclipsing Binaries” by Dominick M. Rowan,  Krzysztof Z. Stanek,  Christopher S. Kochanek & Todd A. Thompson (Ohio State University), Tharindu Jayasinghe (independent researcher),  Jacqueline Blaum (UC Berkeley),  Benjamin J. Fulton (NASA/Caltech),  Ilya Ilyin (AIP Potsdam, Germany),  Howard Isaacson, Natalie LeBaron  &  Jessica R. Lu (UC Berkeley), and  David V. Martin (Tufts University, USA).  This paper was published on Thursday 20th February 2025 in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics and it presents a compilation of mass and readius measurements of red giant stars obtained using spectroscopic measurements together with light curves and the eclipsing binary models obtained using PHOEBE.

The overlay is here:

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

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

The 250th Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics!

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

It’s been a very busy day for various reasons so I’ll just mention that this morning I published the 250th paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. The lucky publication to garner this distinction is “Untangling Magellanic Streams” by Dennis Zaritsky (Steward Observatory), Vedant Chandra (Harvard), Charlie Conroy (Harvard), Ana Bonaca (Carnegie Observatories), Phillip A. Cargile (Harvard), and Rohan P. Naidu (MIT), all based in the USA. Here is the overlay

This will feature in the update on Saturday along with the other papers to be published this week, of which I expect several.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 08/02/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , on February 8, 2025 by telescoper

It’s Saturday morning, so once again it’s time for an update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published one new paper, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 12 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 247.

Galaxy evolution in the post-merger regime. III – The triggering of active galactic nuclei peaks immediately after coalescence” was written by Sara Ellison, Leonardo Ferreira, Robert Bickley & Tess Grindlay (U. Victoria, Canada), Samir Salim (Indiana U., USA), Shoshannah Byrne-Mamahit (Victoria), Shobita Satyapal (George Mason U., USA), David R. Patton (Trent U., Canada) and Jillian M. Scudder (Oberlin College, USA).  It was published on 4th February 2025 and is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies. The paper describes an investigation into the timescale of triggering of AGN activity after galaxy mergers and concluding that most occurs immediately after coalescence. 

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

That’s all for this week. I’ll have more updates next Saturday.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 01/02/2025

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

It’s Saturday morning, so once again it’s time for an update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. There were no papers to report last week but since the last update we have published four new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 11 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 246.

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.

First one up is  “A halo model approach for mock catalogs of time-variable strong gravitational lenses” by Katsuya T. Abe & Masamune Oguri (Chiba U, Japan), Simon Birrer & Narayan Khadka (Stony Brook, USA), Philip J. Marshall (Stanford, USA), Cameron Lemon (Stockholm U., Sweden), Anupreeta More (IUCAA, India), and the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration. It was published on 27th January 2025 in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. The paper discusses how to generate mock catalogs of strongly lensed QSOs and Supernovae on galaxy-, group-, and cluster-scales based on a halo model that incorporates dark matter halos, galaxies, and subhalos.

 

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

This paper, also published on Monday 27th January 2025, but in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “The Soltan argument at redshift 6: UV-luminous quasars contribute less than 10% to early black hole mass growth” by Knud Jahnke (MPI Heidelberg, Germany). This paper presents an argument that almost all growth of supermassive black hole mass at z>6 does not take place in UV-luminous quasars.

Here is a screen grab of the overlay, which includes the abstract:You can find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.

The third paper to announce, published on 29th January 2025 in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, is “A Heavy Seed Black Hole Mass Function at High Redshift – Prospects for LISA” by Joe McCaffrey & John Regan (Maynooth U., Ireland), Britton Smith (Edinburgh U., UK), John Wise (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA), Brian O’Shea (Michigan State U., USA) and Michael Norman (University of California, San Diego). This is a numerical study of the growth rates of massive black holes in the early Universe and implications for their detection via gravitational wave emission.

You can see the overlay here:

 

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

The last paper of this batch is “Forecasting the Detection of Lyman-alpha Forest Weak Lensing from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument and Other Future Surveys” by Patrick Shaw & Rupert A. C. Croft (Carnegie Mellon U., USA) and R. Benton Metcalf (U. Bologna, Italy). This paper, published on January 30th 2025, is about extending the applicationof  Lyman-α forest weak gravitational lensing to lower angular source densities than has previously been done, with forecasts for future spectral surveys. It is in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics.

The overlay is here

 

You can find the accepted version on arXiv here.

Incidentally, we currently have 121 papers under review, including 81 under a revise and resubmit request.

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

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

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

Welcome to the first update of 2025 from the Open Journal of Astrophysics. For the new year we have started Volume 8. Since the last update of 2024 we have published four new papers which brings the total so far published by OJAp up to 239.

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.

First one up is “Weak-Lensing Shear-Selected Galaxy Clusters from the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program: I. Cluster Catalog, Selection Function and Mass–Observable Relation” by Kai-Feng Chen (MIT, USA), I-Non Chiu (National Cheng University, Taiwan), Masamune Oguri (Chiba University, Japan), Yen-Ting Lin (IAAAS, Taiwan), Hironao Miyatake (Nagoya, Japan), Satoshi Miyazaki (Nat. Astr. Obs. Japan), Surhud More (IUCAA, India), Takashi Hamana (Nat. Astr. Obs. Japan), Markus M. Rau Carnegie Mellon University, USA), Tomomi Sunayama (Steward Obs., USA), Sunao Sugiyama (U. Penn, USA), Masahiro Takada (U. Tokyo, Japan).

This paper, which was published on Monday 6th January 2025 is in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, discusses steps towards towards the extraction of cosmogical constraints from a sample of galaxy clusters selected via weak gravitational lensing

Here is a screen grab of the overlay, which includes the abstract:

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

The second paper to announce, published on 7th January 2025 and also in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, is “Cosmology on point: modelling spectroscopic tracer one-point statistics” by Beth McCarthy Gould (Newcastle U., UK), Lina Castiblanco (Bielefeld, Germany), Cora Uhlemann (Bielefeld, Germany), and Oliver Friedrich (LMU, Germany).

You can see the overlay here:

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

The third paper, published on 9th January 2025, also in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, is “Probing Environmental Dependence of High-Redshift Galaxy Properties with the Marked Correlation Function” by Emy Mons and Charles Jose (Cochin University of Science and Technology, India). This paper uses the marked two-point correlation function to measure the environmental dependence of galaxy clustering at high redshift.

Here is the overlay:

The final version accepted on arXiv is here.

Last of this quartet, also published on 9th January 2025, but in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies is “The infrared luminosity of retired and post-starburst galaxies: A cautionary tale for star formation rate measurements” by Vivienne Wild (St Andrews, UK), Natalia Vale Asari (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil), Kate Rowlands (STScI, Sara L. Ellison (U. Victoria, Canada), Ho-Hin Leung (St Andrews), Christy Tremonti (U. Wisconsin-Madison, USA).

The paper proposes an extension of the semi-analytic formalism to weak lensing and thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (tSZ) fields directly on the full-sky, with an emphasis on higher-order correlations. The overlay is here:

You can find the official accepted version on the arXiv here.

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

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on December 28, 2024 by telescoper

I wasn’t planning to do the usual weekly update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics this morning as I thought we wouldn’t publish any more papers between last week’s update and the Christmas break. However, one final version did hit the arXiv on Christmas Eve so I decided to publish it straight away. This brings the total for Volume 7 (2024) to 120 – a neat average of ten a month – and the overall total to 235.

Here’s a table showing the sequence of papers published over the last six years and the series formed from the aforementioned sequence:

Year201920202021202220232024
Papers1215171750120
Total16314865115235

Anyway, the new paper is “Galaxy evolution in the post-merger regime. II – Post-merger quenching peaks within 500 Myr of coalescence” by Sara Ellison (U. Victoria, Canada), Leonardo Ferreira (U. Victoria), Vivienne Wild, (St Andrews, UK), Scott Wilkinson (U. Victoria), Kate Rowlands, (STScI, USA) & David R. Patton (Trent U., Canada). It was published on 24th December 2024 in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies. It comprises an investigation of the possibility that quenching of star formation is a consequence of galaxy-galaxy interactions and mergers. The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

Well, that definitely concludes the updates for 2024. I’ll be back on January 4th with the first update of 2025.

Five New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 21, 2024 by telescoper

Time for the usual Saturday summary of papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. We have published five more papers since the last update a week ago. The count in Volume 7 (2024) is now up to 119 and the total altogether to 234. As I mentioned in a post last week this means we have published more papers this year (2024) than in all previous years put together.

In chronological order, the five 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.

First one up, published on Wednesday 18th December 2024 is “The picasso gas model: Painting intracluster gas on gravity-only simulations” byby Florian Kéruzoré, L. E. Bleem, N. Frontiere, N. Krishnan, M. Buehlmann, J. D. Emberson, S. Habib, and P. Larsen all of the Argonne National Laboratory, USA.  The paper, which is in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics describes a method using machine learning based on an analytical gas model to predict properties of the intracluster medium.

Here is a screen grab of the overlay, which includes the abstract:

 

 

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

The second paper to announce, and the first of four published on Wednesday 19th December 2024, “maria: A novel simulator for forecasting (sub-)mm observations” by J. van Marrewijk (ESO, Garching, Germany) and 10 others based in Germany, USA, Norway, France and Italy. This paper describes a multi-purpose telescope simulator that optimizes scanning strategies and instrument designs, produces synthetic time-ordered data, time streams, and maps from hydrodynamical simulations, thereby enabling comparison between theory and observations. This one is in the folder marked Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics.

You can see the overlay here:

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

The third paper  is “Detached Circumstellar Matter as an Explanation for Slowly-Rising Interacting Type Ibc Supernovae” by Yuki Takei (Kyoto U., Japan) & Daichi Tsuna (Caltech, USA). This one was also published on 19th December and is in the folder marked High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. The overlay is here:

 

 

The officially accepted version can be found on arXiv here.

The fourth paper, also published on 19th December 2024, is called “On the dark matter content of ultra-diffuse galaxies” and was written by Andrey Kravtsov (U. Chicago, USA).  The article discusses the implications of measured velocity dispersions of ultra-diffuse galaxies for models of galaxy formation and is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies.

The overlay is here

 

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

The fifth paper in this batch is “Estimating Exoplanet Mass using Machine Learning on Incomplete Datasets” by Florian Lalande (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology), Elizabeth Tasker (Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Kanagawa) and Kenji Doya (Okinawa); all based in Japan. This one was published on 10th October 2024 in the folder marked Earth and Planetary Astrophysics. It compares different methods for inferring exoplanet masses in catalogues with missing data

 

You can find the official accepted version on the arXiv here.

Finally for this week we have “A new non-parametric method to infer galaxy cluster masses from weak lensing” by Tobias Mistele (Case Western Reserve University, USA) and Amel Durakovic (Czech Academy of Sciences, Czechia). This one was also published on 19th December and is in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics.  The overlay is here

 

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

That’s in for this week. I will do another update next Saturday only if we have any new papers on Monday. I will be taking a break over Christmas and also preparing Volume 8 (2025) for the new year, so publishing will be suspended from 24th December until 2nd January (inclusive). If you want your paper to be published in 2024 the final version must be on arXiv by Monday 23rd December at the latest, otherwise it will be held over until 2025.

 

Four New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 14, 2024 by telescoper

It’s Saturday morning once again so here’s another quick update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update a week ago we have published  four papers, which takes the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 114 and the total published altogether by OJAp up to 229. If we publish just one more paper between now and the end of the year, we will have published as many papers in 2024 as we have in all previous years.

Anyway, 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.

First one up is “Star formation beyond galaxies: widespread in-situ formation of intra-cluster stars” by Niusha Ahvazi & Laura V. Sales (UC Riverside, USA), Julio F. Navarro (U. Victoria, Canada), Andrew Benson (Carnegie Obs. USA), Alessandro Boselli (Aix Marseille U., France) and Richard D’Souza (Vatican Obs.). The paper, which is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies, The paper presents a simulation-based analysis of a diffuse star forming component in galaxy clusters extending for hundreds of kiloparsecs and tracing the distribution of neutral gas in the cluster host halo.

Here is a screen grab of the overlay, which includes the abstract:

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

The second paper to announce, published on 10th December 2024 in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, is “Cosmological Constraints from Combining Photometric Galaxy Surveys and Gravitational Wave Observatories” by E.L. Gagnon, D. Anbajagane, J. Prat, C. Chang, and J. Frieman (all of U. Chicago, USA). This article quantifies the expected cosmological information gain from combining the forecast LSST 3x2pt analysis with the large-scale auto-correlation of GW sources from proposed next-generation GW experiments.

You can see the overlay here:

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

The third paper, also published on 10th December 2024, but in the folder marked Earth and Planetary Astrophysics, has the title “A potential exomoon from the predicted planet obliquity of β Pictoris b” and is written by Michael Poon, Hanno Rein, and Dang Pham all of the University of Toronto, Canada. It presents discussion, based on the β Pictoris system, of the idea that the presence of exomoons can excite misalignment between the spin and orbit axis (obliquity) in exoplanet systems

Here is the overlay

The final version accepted on arXiv is here.

Last of this quartet, published on 11th December 2024, and in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics is “Map-level baryonification: Efficient modelling of higher-order correlations in the weak lensing and thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich fields” and is by Dhayaa Anbajagane & Shivam Pandey (U. Chicago) and Chihway Chang (Columbia U.), all based in the USA.

The paper proposes an extension of the semi-analytic formalism to weak lensing and thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (tSZ) fields directly on the full-sky, with an emphasis on higher-order correlations. The overlay is here:

You can find the official accepted version on the arXiv here.

That’s all for this week. I’ll do another update next Saturday, and that will probably be the last one of the year. If we publish just one more paper between now and 31st December, we will have published as many papers in 2024 as we have in all previous years put together!

Four New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on December 7, 2024 by telescoper

It’s Satuday morning once again so here’s another quick update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update a week ago we have published  four papers, which takes the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 110 and the total published altogether by OJAp up to 225.

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.

First one up is “The impact of feedback on the evolution of gas density profiles from galaxies to clusters: a universal fitting formula from the Simba suite of simulations” by Daniele Sorini & Sownak Bose (Durham University, UK), Romeel Davé (University of Edinburgh, UK), and Daniel Anglés-Alcázar (University of Connecticut, USA). The paper, which is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies, presents a study of the effects of stellar and/or AGN feedback on the shape and evolution of gas density profiles in galaxy haloes using the SIMBA simulations. It was published on Tuesday 3rd December 2024.

Here is a screen grab of the overlay, which includes the abstract:

 

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

The second paper to announce, also published on 3rd December 2024, and is also the folder “Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “Self-regulated growth of galaxy sizes along the star-forming main sequence” by Shweta Jain (U. Kentucky, USA), Sandro Tacchella (U. Cambridge, UK) and Moein Mosleh (Shiraz University, Iran).  This paper suggestes an identification of a possible self-regulating mechanism in galaxy size growth involving the interplay between feedback from star formation and newly accreted gas.

You can see the overlay here:

 

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

The third paper, published on Thursday 6th December 2024 in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, is called  “BLAST: Beyond Limber Angular power Spectra Toolkit. A fast and efficient algorithm for 3×2 pt analysis” by Sofia Chiarenza, Marco Bonici & Will Percival (Waterloo, Canada) and Martin White (Berkeley, USA). It presents BLAST, an efficient algorithm for calculating angular power spectra without employing the Limber approximation or assuming a scale-dependent growth rate, based on the use of Chebyshev polynomials. The code is written in Julia.

Here is the overlay

 

 

The final version accepted on arXiv is here.

Last in this batch, published on 6th December 2024, and in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “On the universality of star formation efficiency in galaxies” by Ava Polzin & Andrey V. Kravtsov (U. Chicago) and Vadim A. Semenov & Nickolay Y. Gnedin (CfA Harvard), all based in the USA. The paper presents an argument that the universality of observational estimates of star formation efficiency per free-fall time can be plausibly explained by the turbulence-driven and feedback-regulated properties of star-forming regions.

You can find the official accepted version on the arXiv here.

We seem to have recovered from a small Thanksgiving lull and, looking at the OJAp workflow, I think we’ll have a similar number of publications next week. I’ll do another update next weekend!

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in Maynooth, OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on November 30, 2024 by telescoper

It’s Saturday morning once again 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, like last week, there is only one paper to report this week, being  the 106th paper in Volume 7 (2024)  and the 221st  altogether. It was published on Thursday 28th November 2024. We have some more papers in the publishing pipeline, which I thought might appear, but they didn’t come out this week possibily because of the Thanksgiving holiday in the USA.

Anyway, The title of the latest paper is “Growth of Light-Seed Black Holes in Gas-Rich Galaxies at High Redshift” by Daxal Mehta, John Regan and Lewis Prole (all of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth*. This paper presents a discussion of the rate of growth of black holes in the early Universe on the basis of simulations run using the Arepo code.

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!

*The authors being from Maynooth, I of course recused myself from the editorial process for this article.