Archive for black holes

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 12/07/2025

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

It’s Saturday morning again, so it’s time again for an update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published seven new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 92, and the total so far published by OJAp  up to 327.

This was a slightly strange week, starting with the fact that there were no new arXiv announcements on Monday 7th July because of the 4th July holiday in the USA on Friday so no papers were published that day. We were not able to publish any papers on Wednesday 9th July either because Crossref was offline for 24 hours that day while its data was migrated into the cloud. Our publishing process requires a live connection with Crossref to deposit metadata upon publication so we can’t publish while that service is down. Fortunately the update seems to have gone well and normal services resumed the following day. That partially accounts for the fact that four of this week’s papers were published on 10th July.

Anyway, The 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 “The Jackknife method as a new approach to validate strong lens mass models” by Shun Nishida & Masamune Oguri (Chiba University, Japan) , Yoshinobu Fudamoto (Steward Observatory, USA) and Ayari Kitamura (Tohoku University, Japan). This article, which is in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics,  describes and application of the Jackknife statistical resampling techique to gravitational lensing by removing lensed images and recalcualting the mass modelIt was published on Tuesday 8th July 2025. The overlay is here:

 

The officially-accepted version can be found on arXiv here.

The second paper is “Low redshift post-starburst galaxies host abundant HI reservoirs” by Sara Ellison (U. Victoria, Canada) and 10 others based in China, UK, Spain, USA and Canada.  This one was also published oon Tuesday 8th July but in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. This paper uses 21cm observations of a sample of post-starburst galaxies, to show  that they contain large reservoirs of neutral hydrogen. Here is the overlay:

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

Next one up, one of four published on Thursday 10th July, is “Predicting the number density of heavy seed massive black holes due to an intense Lyman-Werner field” by Hannah O’Brennan (Maynooth University, Ireland) and 7 others based in Ireland, USA and Italy. This paper presents an exploration of the scenario for black hole formation driven by Lyman-Werner photons (i.e. ultraviolet radiation in the range 11.2 to 13.6 eV). It is in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, and the overlay is here:

 

You can read the final accepted version on arXiv here.

The fourth paper this week, and the second published on 10th July, is “Chemical Abundances in the Metal-Poor Globular Cluster ESO 280-SC06: A Formerly Massive, Tidally Disrupted Globular Cluster” by Sam A. Usman (U. Chicago, USA) and 8 others based in the USA, Canada and Australia. This paper, which is in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, presents a detailed spectroscopic study of the chemical abundances in a Milky Way globular cluster ESO 280-SC06. The overlay is here:

The officially accepted version of the paper can be read here.

Next one up, also published on 10th July and also in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies is “Predictions for the Detectability of Milky Way Satellite Galaxies and Outer-Halo Star Clusters with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory” by Kabelo Tsiane (U. Michigan) and 9 others on behalf of the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration.

The overlay is here:

 

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

The penultimate paper for this week, and the last of the batch published on 10th July,  is “Systematically Measuring Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies. VIII. Misfits, Miscasts, and Miscreants” by Dennis Zaritsky, Richard Donnerstein, and Donghyeon J. Khim (Steward Observatory, U. Arizona, USA). This paper presents a morphological study of weird and wonderful galaxies as part of an effort to Systematically Measure Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies (the SMUDGes survey). It is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies. The overlay is here:

 

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

The last article published this week is “Differential virial analysis: a new technique to determine the dynamical state of molecular clouds” by Mark R. Krumholz (ANU, Australia), Charles J. Lada (Harvard, USA) & Jan Forbrich (U. Herts, UK). This paper presents simple analytic models of supported and collapsing molecular clouds, tested using full 3D simulations and applied to observed clouds in Andromeda. It is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies and was published yesterday, i.e on Friday 11th July 2025. Here is the overlay

 

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

And that’s all the papers for this week. I will, however, take this opportunity to mention that a while ago I was interviewed about the Open Journal of Astrophysics by Colin Stuart on behalf of the Foundational Questions Institute; the write-up of the interview can be found here.

Primordial Black Holes in Cosmological Simulations

Posted in Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on June 29, 2025 by telescoper

Being so busy for the last couple of weeks I omitted to engage in the gratuitous self-promotion that one would expect from a blogger, so I’m remedying that today by pointing out that I’m co-author of a new paper that is now on arXiv. This has already gained a bit of traction in the media, e.g. here.

Here is the abstract, which also shows the author list:

(I’ve just noticed that it says “The Netherland”, instead of “The Netherlands”. Oops!)

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!

P.S. This article has been submitted to the Open Journal of Astrophysics and is currently under review. As an author I am not involved in the editorial process.

Roger Penrose: Discoverer of Black Holes?

Posted in History, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , on February 27, 2025 by telescoper

I got home from a busy day on campus to find the 21st February issue of the Times Literary Supplement had landed on my doormat having arrived today, 27th February. It used to take a couple of weeks for my subscription copy to reach Ireland but recently the service has improved. Intriguingly, the envelope it comes in is postmarked Bratislava…

But I digress. This is the cover:

The text below the title “Light on darkness” under the graphic reads “Roger Penrose, discoverer of black holes, by Jennan Ismael”. Nice though it is to see science featured in the Times Literary Supplement for a change and much as I admire Roger Penrose, it is unreasonable to describe him as “the discoverer of black holes”.

A black hole represents a region of space-time where the action of gravity is sufficiently strong that light cannot escape. The idea that such a phenomenon might exist dates back to John Michell, an English clergyman, in 1783, and later by Pierre-Simon Laplace but black holes are most commonly associated with Einstein’s theory of general relativity.  Indeed, one of the first exact solutions of Einstein’s equations to be found describes such an object. The famous Schwarzschild solution was obtained in 1915 by Karl Schwarzschild, who died soon after on the Eastern front in the First World War. The solution corresponds to a spherically-symmetric distribution of matter, and it was originally intended that it could form the basis of a mathematical model for a star. It was soon realised, however that for an object of any mass M there is a critical radius (Rs, the Schwarzschild radius) such that if all the mass is squashed inside Rs then no light can escape.  In terms of the mass M, velocity of light c, and Newton’s constant G, the critical radius is given by Rs = 2GM/c2 . For the mass of the Earth, the critical radius is only 1cm, whereas for the Sun it is about 3km.

Since the pioneering work of Schwarzschild, research on black holes has been intense and other kinds of mathematical solutions have been obtained. For example, the Kerr solution describes a rotating black hole and  the Reissner -Nordstrom solution corresponds to  a black hole with an electric charge.  Various theorems have also been demonstrated relating to the so-called `no-hair’ conjecture: that black holes give very little outward sign of what is inside.

Some people felt that the Schwarzschild solution was physically unrealistic as it required a completely spherical object, but Roger Penrose showed mathematically that the existence of a trapped surface was a generic consequence of gravitational collapse, the result that won him the Nobel Prize in 2020. His work did much to convince scientists of the physical reality of black holes, and he deserved his Nobel Prize, but I don’t think it is fair to say he “discovered” them.

I would say that, as is the case for discoveries in many branches of science, there isn’t just one “discoverer” of black holes: there were important contributions by many people along the way.

P.S. If you want to limit the application of the word “discovery” to observations then I think that the discovery of black holes is down to Paul Murdin and Louise Webster who identified the first really plausible candidate for a black hole in Cygnus X-1, way back in 1971…

P.P.S. The term “Black Hole” was, as far as I know, coined by John Wheeler in 1967.

Roger Penrose is 93.

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.

Six New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 12, 2024 by telescoper

Regular readers of this blog (both of them) will have noticed that I didn’t post an update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics last weekend. Despite having accepted several papers for publication in the preceding week, no final versions had made it onto the arXiv. We can’t published a paper until the authors post the final version, so that meant a bit of a backlog developed. This week included one day with no arXiv update (owing to a US holiday on Tuesday 8th October) and a major glitch on Crossref on Thursday which delayed a couple, but even so we’ve published six papers which is the most we’ve ever managed in a week. This week saw the publication of our 200th article; the total as of today is 202.  The count in Volume 7 (2024) is now up to 87; we have four papers in the queue for publication so we should pass 90 next week if all goes well.

In chronological order, the six 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 Monday 7th October 2024 is “z~2 dual AGN host galaxies are disky: stellar kinematics in the ASTRID Simulation” by Ekaterina Dadiani (CMU; Carnegie Mellon U.) Tiziana di Matteo (CMU), Nianyi Chen (CMU), Patrick Lachance (CMU), Yue Shen (U. Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Yu-Ching Chen (Johns Hopkins U.), Rupert Croft (CMU), Yueying Ni (CfA Harvard) and Simeon Bird (U. California Riverside) – all based in the USA. The paper, which is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies describes a numerical study of the morphology of AGN host galaxies containing close pairs of black holes.

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 8th October 2024, is “Origin of LAMOST J1010+2358 Revisited” by S.K. Jeena and Projjwal Banerjee of the Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad, Kerala, India. This paper discusses  the possible formation mechanisms for Very Metal Poor (VMP) stars and the implications for the origin of LAMOST J1010+2358 and is in the folder marked Solar and Stellar Astrophysics.

You can see the overlay here:

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

The third paper is very different in both style and content: “Assessing your Observatory’s Impact: Best Practices in Establishing and Maintaining Observatory Bibliographies” by Raffaele D’Abrusco (Harvard CfA and 14 others; the Observatory Bibliographers Collaboration) and is in the folder marked Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. It presents discussion of the methods used by astronomical observatories to construct and analyze bibliographic databases. The overlay is here:

(This one gave me a rare opportunity to use the library of stock images that comes with the Scholastica platform!) The officially accepted version can be found on arXiv here.

The fourth paper, also published on 8th October 2024, and our 200th publication, is in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, and is called “CombineHarvesterFlow: Joint Probe Analysis Made Easy with Normalizing Flows“. The authors are Peter L. Taylor, Andrei Cuceu, Chun-Hao To, and Erik A. Zaborowski of Ohio State University, USA. The article presents a new method that speeds up the sampling of joint posterior distributions in the context of inference using combinations of data sets. 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 “Forecasting the accuracy of velocity-field reconstruction” by Chris Blake and Ryan Turner of Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. This was also published on 10th October 2024 and is in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. The paper describes a numerical study of the reliability and precision of different methods of velocity-density reconstruction. The overlay is here

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

That’s it for now. We have published six papers, with a very wide geographical spread of authors, and in five of the six astro-ph categories we cover. I think it’s been a good week!

Two New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

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

It’s Saturday morning again so here’s another report on activity at the  Open Journal of Astrophysics.  Since the last update we have published two more papers, taking  the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 73 and the total published by OJAp up to 188.  We’ve still got a few in the pipeline waiting for the final versions to appear on arXiv so I expect we’ll reach the 200 mark fairly soon.

The first paper of the most recent pair, published on September 4th 2024,  and in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “Massive Black Hole Seeds”  by John Regan of the Department of Theoretical Physics at Maynooth University and Marta Volonteri (Sorbonne Université, Paris, France). This article presents a discussion of the pathways to the formation of massive black holes, including both light and heavy initial seeds.

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

 

 

You can click on the image of the overlay to make it larger should you wish to do so. Those of you who are paying attention will see that there is a bit of a glitch on the left hand side where software has thrown a line break in between the two author names. I have no idea what caused this so I raised a ticket with Scholastica and no doubt it will soon be fixed.  (Update: it is now fixed, 12th September 2024). You can find the officially accepted version of this paper on the arXiv here.

The second paper has the title “The future of cosmological likelihood-based inference: accelerated high-dimensional parameter estimation and model comparison” and was published on 5th September 2024. The authors are Davide Piras (Université de Genève), Alicja Polanska (MSSL) , Alessio Spurio Mancini (Royal Holloway, London), Matthew A. Price(UCL) & Jason D. McEwen (UCL); the latter four are all based in the UK. This paper, which is in  the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, describes an accelerated approach to Bayesian inference in higher-dimensional settings, as required for cosmology, based on recent developments in machine learning and its underlying technology.

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

 

 

You can click on the image of the overlay to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.

That concludes this week’s update. More  next week!

Three New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , on May 18, 2024 by telescoper

It’s time once more for the usual  Saturday roundup of business at the  Open Journal of Astrophysics. The latest batch of publications consists of three papers, taking the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 39 and the total published by OJAp up to 154. We’re still on track to publish around 100 papers this year, compared to last year’s 50.

All three of this week’s papers involve use of data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, which is proving an immensely rich resource for astrophysics.

First one up is “Asymmetric Drift Map of the Milky Way Disk Populations between 8 -16 kpc with LAMOST and Gaia datasets” which is by  Xin Li (Nanchong, China), Peng Yang (Chengdu, China) , Hai-Feng Wang (Nanchong, China), Qing Li (Jiangmen, China), Yang-Ping Luo (Nanchong, China), Zhi-Quan Luo (Nanchong, China), Guan-Yu Wang (Nanchong, China). This is a study  of the asymmetric drift, the difference of the local circular speed and the mean rotational speed of the stellar population, for various stellar populations in the Milky Way. It is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies and was published on Tuesday 14th May 2024.

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

 

 

You can read the paper directly on arXiv here.

The second paper to announce is “On the formation of a 33 solar-mass black hole in a low-metallicity binary” by Kareem El-Badry (Caltech, USA). It discusses theoretical models for the formation of a black hole in a particular binary system discovered in Gaia data.

This one is in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics and was published on 16th May 2024. The overlay looks like this:

 

 

You can read this paper directly on the arXiv here.

The last paper of this batch, also in the in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics, is entitled “Compact Binary Formation in Open Star Clusters II: Difficulty of Gaia NS formation in low-mass star clusters”  and it presents a discussion of the formation of binary neutron stars and black holes found in Gaia data based on their orbital properties. It was published on Friday May 17th 2024 (i.e. yesterday). The authors are Ataru Tanikawa (Fukui University, Japan), Long Wang (Sun-yat Sen University, China) and  Michiko S. Fujii (Tokyo University, Japan).

Here is a screengrab of the overlay:

 

 

To read the accepted version of this on the arXiv please go here.
That’s all for now. Another update next week!

 

 

Three New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 27, 2024 by telescoper

It’s time for the usual  Saturday roundup of business at the  Open Journal of Astrophysics. The latest batch of publications consists of three papers, taking the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 30 and the total published by OJAp up to 145.

First one up is “Baryonic Imprints on DM Halos: the concentration-mass relation and its dependence on halo and galaxy properties” .  The authors, Mufan Shao and Dhayaa Anbajagane of the University of Chicago, USA, use  a non-linear model informed by simulations to study the imprint of galaxy formation physics on the concentration-mass relationship using various different choices of halo selection criteria. This one is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies and was published on 24th April 2024.

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

 

You can read the paper directly on arXiv here.

The second paper to announce is “Variability in SSTc2d J163134.1-240100, a brown dwarf with quasi-spherical mass loss” which describes a search for variability in a brown dwarf star known to be losing mass and the implications of the lack thereof for the reason for the outflow therefrom. The authors are Aleks Scholz (St Andrews, UK),  Koraljka Muzic (Lisbon, Portugal), Victor Almendros-Abad (Palermo, Italy), Antonella Natta (DIAS, Ireland), Dary Ruiz-Rodriguez (NRAO, USA), Lucas Cieza (Uni. Diego Portales, Chile), Cristina Rodriguez-Lopez (IAA-CSIC, Granada, Spain)

This one is in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics and was also published on 24th April 2024. The overlay looks like this:

 

You can read this paper directly on the arXiv here.

The last paper of this batch, also in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies, is  entitled “MAGICS I. The First Few Orbits Encode the Fate of Seed Massive Black Hole Pairs”  and is a computational study of the process by which massive black holes are formed by merging smaller seed black holes. It was published on April 26th 2024 (i.e. yesterday). The authors are: Nianyi Chen, Diptajyoti Mukherjee and Tiziana Di Matteo (all Carnegie Mellon University); Yueying Ni (Harvard); Simeon Bird (University of California, Riverside); and Rupert Croft (Carnegie Mellon University). All authors are based in the USA.

Here is a screengrab of the overlay:

 

To read the accepted version of this on the arXiv please go here.
That’s all for now. More news in a week or so!

 

 

Two New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , on April 20, 2024 by telescoper

It’s Saturday, and it’s time to post another update relating to the  Open Journal of Astrophysics.  Since the last update we have published two more papers, taking  the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 27 and the total published by OJAp up to 142.

The first paper of the most recent pair – published on  Tuesday April 16th – is “An Enhanced Massive Black Hole Occupation Fraction Predicted in Cluster Dwarf Galaxies” by Michael Tremmel (UCC, Ireland), Angelo Ricarte (Harvard, USA), Priyamvada Natarajan (Yale, USA), Jillian Bellovar (American Museum of Natural History, New York, USA), Ray Sharma (Rutgers, USA), Thomas R. Quinn (University of Washington, USA). It presents a  study, based on the Romulus cosmological simulations, of the impact of environment on the occupation fraction of massive black holes in low mass galaxies. This one is in the folder marked “Astrophysics of Galaxies“.

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

 

You can click on the image of the overlay to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.

The second paper was published on Wednesday 17th April and has the title “A 1.9 solar-mass neutron star candidate in a 2-year orbit” and the authors are: Kareem El-Badry (Caltech, USA), Joshua D. Simon (Carnegie Observatories, USA), Henrique Reggiani (Gemini Observatory, Chile), Hans-Walter Rix (Heidelberg, Germany),  David W. Latham (Harvard, USA),  Allyson Bieryla (Harvard, USA),  Lars A. Buchhave (Technical University of Denmark, Denmark),  Sahar Shahaf (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel),  Tsevi Mazeh (Tel Aviv University, Israel), Sukanya Chakrabarti (University of Alabama, USA), Puragra Guhathakurta (University of California Santa Cruz, USA), Ilya V. Ilyin (Potsdam, Germany), and Thomas M. Tauris (Aalborg University, Denmark)

This one, which is in the folder marked Solar and Stellar Astrophysics, presents a discussion of the discovery of a 1.9 solar mass neutron star candidate using Gaia astrometric data, together with the implications of its orbital parameters for the formation mechanism.

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

 

 

 

You can click on the image of the overlay to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.

That concludes this week’s update!

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on December 31, 2023 by telescoper

It’s New Year’s Eve and I just remembered that there was a paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics site that we published before Christmas but that I haven’t yet announced on here, so for the sake of completeness here it is. It takes us to 50 papers published in 2023.

The paper in question is the 50th and final paper  in Volume 6 (2023)  and it’s the 115th altogether. This one was actually published on Friday 22nd December 2023 but owing to the vacations we had to wait a bit to get the metadata registered.

The title of this one is “What are the parities of photon-ring images near a black hole?” and is a discussion of the Fermat potential (also known as the arrival-time surface) in the context of gravitational lensing by strong gravitational fields and the implication for image parities thereby produced. This one is actually listed in General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc, on arXiv) but is cross-listed as Cosmology and Non-galactic Astrophysics so is eligible for publication here in the appropriate folder.

The authors are Ashish Kumar Meena (Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel) and Prasenjit Saha (University of Zurich, Switzerland).

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

And that concludes Volume 6 of the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Roll on Volume 7.