Archive for Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 11/10/2025

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

It’s time once again for the usual Saturday update of the week’s new papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published six  more papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 152, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 387. Not only have we passed the 150 mark for the year, but this week saw another record for the Journal, in that it was the first week in which we published at least one paper on every day.

Anyway, here are this week’s papers:

The first paper is “Mapping the Nearest Ancient Sloshing Cold Front in the Sky with XMM-Newton” by Sheng-Chieh Lin (University of Kentucky) and 10 others based in the USA, Spain and Germany. This article, published on Monday 6th October 2025, in the section High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena discusses cold fronts in the Virgo Cluster, their importance in shaping the thermal dynamics of the intracluster medium beyond the cluster core, and their implications for cluster cosmology.

The overlay is here:

 

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

The second paper this week, also published on Monday 6th October, is “Testing gravitational physics by combining DESI DR1 and weak lensing datasets using the E_G estimator” by S.J. Rauhut (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia) and an international cast of 63 others. This one is in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, and it presents a comparison of  Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) measurements from BOSS, DESI with weak lensing from KiDS, DES and HSC showing that the results are altogether consistent with the standard cosmological model.

The overlay is here:

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

Next one up is “Analysis of Galaxies at the Extremes: Failed Galaxy Progenitors in the MAGNETICUM Simulations” by Jonah S. Gannon (Swinburne University, Australia), Lucas C. Kimmig (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Germany; LMU), Duncan A. Forbes (Swinburne), Jean P. Brodie (Swinburne), Lucas M. Valenzuela (LMU), Rhea-Silvia Remus (LMU), Joel L. Pfeffer (Swinburne) and Klaus Dolag (LMU). This paper, published on Tuesday 7th October 2025, in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, discusses the business of identifying the possible high-redshift progenitors of low-redshift ultra-diffuse galaxies in cosmological simulations.

The corresponding overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

The fourth paper this week, published on Wednesday 8th October 2025 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies,  is
What Sets the Metallicity of Ultra-Faint Dwarfs?” by Vance Wheeler, Andrey Kravtsov, Anirudh Chiti & Harley Katz (U. Chicago) and Vadim A. Semenov (CfA Harvard), all based in the USA.

The overlay is here:

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

Next, and fifth, we have our 150th publication of 2025, “Synthesizer: a Software Package for Synthetic Astronomical Observables” by Christopher C. Lovell (Cambridge, UK), William J. Roper, Aswin P. Vijayan & Stephen M. Wilkins (Sussex, UK), Sophie Newman (Portsmouth, UK) and Louise Seeyave (Sussex). This paper presents a suite of software tools for creating synthetic astrophysical observables for use in mock galaxy catalogues. It was published on Thursday 9th October 2025 in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

And finally for this week we have “Introducing the THESAN-ZOOM project: radiation-hydrodynamic simulations of high-redshift galaxies with a multi-phase interstellar medium” by Rahul Kannan (York University, Canada) and 13 others based in the USA, Germany, Japan, Italy and the UK. This one was published on Friday 10th October (i.e. yesterday) in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It describes a comprehensive suite of high-resolution zoom-in simulations of high-redshift galaxies, encompassing a diverse range of halo masses, selected from the THESAN simulation volume.

The corresponding overlay is here:

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

That concludes the papers for this week. I will, however, add a short postscript. This week saw the announcement of this year’s list of MacArthur Fellows. among them Kareem El-Badry who has published quite a few papers with the Open Journal of Astrophysics. His biography on the MacArthur Foundation page includes this:

He has published articles in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical SocietyThe Astrophysical Journal, and The Open Journal of Astrophysics, among other leading scientific journals.

I’m pleased to see us listed with the established names. I mention this just in case there are still people out there who think it might damage their career if they publish with a non-mainstream journal. I guess we are mainstream now…

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 04/10/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 4, 2025 by telescoper

It’s Saturday again, so it’s time for a summary of the week’s new papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published five more papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 146, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 381. At this rate Volume 8 will contain around 190 by the end of 2025.

Anyway, here are this week’s papers, starting with three published on Monday 29th September 2025.

The first paper is “Cosmic Multipoles in Galaxy Surveys II: Comparing Different Methods in Assessing the Cosmic Dipole” by Vasudev Mittal, Oliver T. Oayda and Geraint F. Lewis (U. Sydney, Australia). This is in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. It presents a comparison of methods for determining the number count dipole from cosmological surveys with a discussion of the implications for the known discordance with the CMB diple.

The overlay is here:

You can make this larger by clicking on it.  The officially accepted version of this paper can be found on the arXiv here.

The second paper this week, also published on Monday 29th September, is “SDSS-C4 3028: the Nearest Blue Galaxy Cluster Devoid of an Intracluster Medium” by Shweta Jain (University of Kentucky, USA) and 11 others based in the USA, Australia and Korea. This describes a galaxy cluster with an unusually high fraction (about 63%) of star-forming galaxies which may be a result of ram pressure stripping; the article is in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies.

The corresponding overlay is here:

 

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

The third one this week, published on also published on Monday 29th September but in the folder Earth and Planetary Astrophysics, is “Comparing the Architectures of Multiplanet Systems from Kepler, K2, and TESS Data” by Robert L Royer and Jason H. Steffen (University of Nevada, USA).  This paper explores the trends seen in exoplanet survey data, including Kepler, TESS, and K2 including many planetary systems with multiple planets.

The overlay is here:

 

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

The next one up is “Seeding Cores: A Pathway for Nuclear Star Clusters from Bound Star Clusters in the First Billion Years” by Fred Angelo Batan Garcia (Columbia University, USA), Massimo Ricotti (University of Maryland, USA) and Kazuyuki Sugimura (Hokkaido University, Japan). This paper was published on Thursday 2nd October in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. This is about modelling the formation of Nuclear Star Clusters using cosmological radiation-hydrodynamic simulations, with discussion of the implications for seeding supermassive black holes and the little red dots seen by JWST.

The corresponding overlay is here:

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

The fifth and last one for this week, published on Friday 3rd October 2025, is “Efficient semi-analytic modelling of Pop III star formation from Cosmic Dawn to Reionization” by Sahil Hegde and Steven R. Furlanetto (University of Californi Los Angeles, USA).  This is also in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies. It uses a self-consistent analytic model to trace the formation of the first stars from their birth through the first billion years of the universe’s history. complementing semi-analytic and computational methods.

 

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

That concludes the report for this week. I’ll post another update next Saturday.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 27/09/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 27, 2025 by telescoper

It’s Saturday again, so it’s time for a summary of the week’s new papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published five new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 141, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 376.

The first paper to report this week is “The Bispectrum of Intrinsic Alignments: Theory Modelling and Forecasts for Stage IV Galaxy Surveys” by Thomas Bakx (Utrecht U., NL), Alexander Eggemeier (U. Bonn, DE), Toshiki Kurita (MPA Garching, DE), Nora Elisa Chisari (Leiden U., NL) and Zvonimir Vlah (Ruđer Bošković Institute, Croatia). This paper was published on Monday 22nd September 2025 in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. It studies the bispectrum of intrinsic galaxy alignments, a possible source of systematic errors in extracting cosmological information from the analysis of weak lensing surveys.

The overlay is here:

You can make this larger by clicking on it.  The officially accepted version of this paper can be found on the arXiv here.

The second paper this week, published on Tuesday 23rd September 2025 is “Reanalysis of Stage-III cosmic shear surveys: A comprehensive study of shear diagnostic tests” by Jazmine Jefferson (University of Chicago, USA) and 13 others for the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration. It is also in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics; it describes diagnostic tests on three public shear catalogs (KiDS-1000, Year 3 DES-Y3 s, and Year 3 HSC-Y3); not all the surveys pass all the tests.

The corresponding overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

The third one this week, published on Wednesday 24th September 2025 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “Is feedback-free star formation possible?” by Andrea Ferrara, Daniele Manzoni, and Evangelia Ntormousi (all of the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy). This paper presents an argument that Lyman-alpha radiation pressure strongly limits star formation efficiency, even at solar metallicities, so that a feedback-free star formation phase is not possible without feedback. The overlay is here:

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

Next we have “Microphysical Regulation of Non-Ideal MHD in Weakly-Ionized Systems: Does the Hall Effect Matter?” by Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech, USA), Jonathan Squire (U. Otago, New Zeland), Raphael Skalidis (Caltech) and Nadine H. Soliman (Caltech). This was also published on Wednesday 24th September 2025, but in the folder Earth and Planetary Astrophysics. It presents an improved treatment of non-ideal effects in magnetohydrodynamics, particularly the Hall effect, and a discussion of the implications for weakly-ionized astrophysical systems.

The corresponding overlay is here:

 

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

The fifth, and last, one for this week is “The Local Volume Database: a library of the observed properties of nearby dwarf galaxies and star clusters” by Andrew B. Pace (University of Virginia, USA). This one was published on Friday 26th September (i.e. yesterday) in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It presents a catalogue of positional, structural, kinematic, chemical, and dynamical parameters for dwarf galaxies and star clusters in the Local Volume. The overlay is here:

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

 

And that concludes the report for this week. I’ll post another update next Saturday.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 13/09/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 13, 2025 by telescoper

It’s Saturday again, so it’s time for another summary of the week’s new papers 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 134, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 369. We seem to be emerging for the slight late-summer hiatus we have experienced over the last few weeks.

Anyway, the first paper to report this week is “Observing the Sun with the Atacama Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (AtLAST): Forecasting Full-disk Observations” by Mats Kirkaune & Sven Wedemeyer (U. Oslo, Norway), Joshiwa van Marrewijk (Leiden U., Netherlands), Tony Mroczkowski (ESO, Garching, Germany) and Thomas W. Morris (Yale, USA). This paper discusses possible strategies and parameters for full-disk observations of the Sun using the proposed Atacama Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (AtLAST). It was published on Tuesday 9th September 2025 in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics.

The overlay is here:

 

You can make this larger by clicking on it.  The officially accepted version of this paper can be found on the arXiv here.

The second paper this week, published on Wednesday 10th September in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, is “The exact non-Gaussian weak lensing likelihood: A framework to calculate analytic likelihoods for correlation functions on masked Gaussian random fields” by Veronika Oehl and Tilman Tröster (ETH Zurich, Switzerland).  This paper shows how to calculate likelihoods for the correlation functions of spin-2 Gaussian random fields defined on the sphere in the presence of a mask with applications to weak gravitational lensing.

The overlay is here:

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

Next one up, the third paper this week, is  “Subspace Approximation to the Focused Transport Equation. II. The Modified Form” by B. Klippenstein and Andreas Shalchi (U. Manitoba, Canada). This was also published on 10th September 2025 in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. It is about solving the focused transport equation analytically and numerically using the subspace method in two or more dimensions.

You can find the final accepted version on arXiv here.

The fourth paper of this week was also published on Wednesday 10th September. It is “Mass models of galaxy clusters from a non-parametric weak-lensing reconstruction” by Tobias Mistele (Case Western Reserve U., USA), Federico Lelli (INAF, Firenze, Italy), Stacy McGaugh (Case Western), James Schombert (U. Oregon, USA) and Benoit Famaey (Université de Strasbourg, France).  Published in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, it presents new, non-parametric deprojection method for weak gravitational lensing applied to a sample of galaxy clusters. The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

The fifth paper of the week is “A Swift Fix II: Physical Parameters of Type I Superluminous Supernovae” by Jason T. Hinkle & Benjamin J. Shappee (U. Hawaii, USA) and Michael A. Tucke (Ohio State, USA). This one was published on Thursday 11th September 2025 in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. The paper uses recalibrated Swift photometry to recompute peak luminosities and other properties of a sample of superluminous Type I supernovae. The overlay is here:

You can find the official accepted version on arXiv here.

Paper No. 6 for this week is “Detailed Microwave Continuum Spectra from Bright Protoplanetary Disks in Taurus” by Caleb Painter (Harvard, USA) and 11 others, too numerous to mention by name, based in the USA, Germany, Mexico and Taiwan.  This one was published in the folder marked Solar and Stellar Astrophysics on September 11th 2025. It presents new observations sampling the microwave (4-360 GHz) continuum spectra from eight young stellar systems in the Taurus region. The overlay is here:

 

The final version can be found on arXiv here.

The last paper for this update is “On Soft Clustering For Correlation Estimators” by Edward Berman (Northeastern University, USA) and 13 others based in the USA, France, Denmark and Finland and Cosmos-Web:The JWST Cosmic Origins Survey. This was published on Friday 12th September 2025 in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. It presents an algorithm for estimating correlations that clusters objects in a probabilistic fashion, enabling the uncertainty caused by clustering to be quantified simply through model inference. The overlay is here:

You can find the final version on arXiv here.

And that’s all the papers for this week. I’ve noticed a significant recent increase in the number of papers in Solar and Stellar Astrophysics, which means we’re broadening our impact across the community. Which is nice.

P.S. I found out last week that, according to NASA/ADS, papers in OJAp have now accumulated over 5000 citations.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 06/09/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on September 6, 2025 by telescoper

It’s Saturday again, so it’s time for a summary of the week’s new papers 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 127, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 362. It’s been another relatively slow week, not least because of the Labor (sic) Day holiday in the USA on Monday which, among other things, meant there was no arXiv update on Tuesday.

Anyway, the first paper to report this week is “An analytical model for the dispersion measure of Fast Radio Burst host galaxies” by Robert Reischke, Michael Kovač & Andrina Nicola (U. Bonn, Germany), Steffen Hagstotz (Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München) and Aurel Schneider (U. Zurich, Switzlerland). This is a theoretical study of the dispersion measures (DMs) intrinsic to host galaxies of Fast Radio Burst (FRB) sources to enable separation of that from the line-of-sight DM. This one was published on Monday 1st September 2025 in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics.

The overlay is here:

 

You can make this larger by clicking on it.  The officially accepted version of this paper can be found on the arXiv here.

The second paper this week, published on Wednesday 3rd Sepember in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics, is “Complex spectral variability and hints of a luminous companion in the Be star + black hole binary candidate ALS 8814” by Kareem El-Badry (Caltech, USA), Matthias Fabry (Villanova U., USA), Hugues Sana (KU Leuven, Belgium), Tomer Shenar (Tel Aviv U., Israel) and Rhys Seeburger (MPA Heidelberg, Germany).

The overlay for this one is here:

 

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

And that’s all the papers for this week. It’s still a bit slow as we emerge from the summer vacations, we have a lot of papers in the pipeline that I expect to emerge pretty soon.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 30/08/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 30, 2025 by telescoper

Once again it’s time for a summary of the week’s new papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published three new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 125, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 360.

The first paper to report this week is “Large-scale surveys of the quasar proximity effect” by Rupert Croft, Patrick Shaw & Ann-Marsha Alexis (Carnegie Mellon University; CMU), Nianyi Chen (Princeton), Yihao Zhou & Tiziana Di Matteo (CMU), Simeon Bird (UC Riverside), Patrick Lachance (CMU), and Yueying Ni (Harvard). This paper was published on Monday 25th August in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. It presents a CDM-based halo model of the quasar proximity effect, tested on quasar Lyman-alpha spectra from the ASTRID cosmological simulation, including self-consistent formation of quasar black holes and the intergalactic medium.

The overlay is here:

 

You can make this larger by clicking on it, as you can with all the overlays below. The officially accepted version of this paper can be found on the arXiv here.

The second paper this week, also published on Monday 25th August, but in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “Redshift evolution of Lyman continuum escape fraction after JWST” by Andrea Ferrara (Pisa), M. Giavalisco (UMass Amherst), L. Pentericci (Rome), E. Vanzella (Bologna), A. Calabrò (Rome) and M. Llerena (Rome). This paper is about the Attenuation-Free Model (AFM) for galaxies, in which radiation-driven outflows develop once the galaxy specific star formation rate exceeds a certain level, which is tested on data with positive results. The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

The third and final paper this week is “Primordial black holes in cosmological simulations: growth prospects for supermassive black holes” by Lewis R Prole, John A Regan, Daxal Mehta & Peter Coles (National University of Ireland, Maynooth) and Pratika Dayal (Groningen, NL). This one was published in Astrophysics of Galaxies folder on Thursday 28th August 2025. You can read more about this paper here: basically it studies the growth of primordial black holes in the early Universe using numerical simulations, with implications for the subsequent formation of massive black holes.

The overlay is here:

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

And that’s all the papers for this week. It’s still a bit slow as we emerge from the summer vacations, but I expect things will start to pick up from now on.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 23/08/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 23, 2025 by telescoper

So it’s Saturday again, so it’s time for the usual update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics which I do every Saturday. Since the last update we have published six new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 122, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 357. As I mentioned here we have overtaken the total of 120 published in Volume 7 (2024) and are on track for in excess of 180 publications in 2025.

The first paper to report this week is “Mass-feeding of jet-launching white dwarfs in grazing and common envelope evolution” by Noam Soker (Technion, Haifa, Israel). This was published on Tuesday 19th August in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. It proposes a theoretical suggestion about the production of jets in common-envelope evolution with massive stars.

The overlay is here:

You can make this larger by clicking on it, as you can with all the overlays below. The officially accepted version of this paper can be found on the arXiv here.

The second paper this week, published on Wednesday 20th August in the folder Earth and Planetary Astrophysics, is “Transition metal abundance as a key parameter for the search of Life in the Universe” by Giovanni Covone and Donato Giovannelli (University of Naples, Italy). This paper presents an argument that the availability of transition elements is an essential feature of habitability, and should be considered as such in selecting exoplanetary targets in the search for life.

The overlay is here:

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

The third paper this week, also published on 20th August 2025 in the folder Earth and Planetary Astrophysics, is “Discrete element simulations of self-gravitating rubble pile collisions: the effects of non-uniform particle size and rotation” by Job Guidos, Lucas Kolanz and Davide Lazzati (Oregon State University, USA).  This presents a new computer code for simulating the growth of granular masses through collisions of smaller particles and discusses results generated by it.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

The next paper, the fourth this week, is “Seeing the Outer Edge of the Infant Type Ia Supernova 2024epr in the Optical and Near Infrared” by W.B. Hoogendam (University of Hawaii, USA) and 32 others – too numerous to list by name – based in various institutes in the USA, Australia, UK, Denmark, Taiwan and China. This paper was also published on Wednesday 20th August 2025, but in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena.  The article reports on the results of optical-to-near-infrared photometry and spectroscopy of the Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) 2024epr and a discusses how these challenge models for this sort of supernova.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

The fifth paper this week is “Computing Nonlinear Power Spectra Across Dynamical Dark Energy Model Space with Neural ODEs” by Peter L. Taylor of Ohio State University (USA).  This one shows how to compute the evolution of cosmological power spectra into the non-linear regime via neural differential equations. It was published on Friday 22nd August 2025 in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

And finally for this week we have “Symbiotic star candidates in Gaia Data Release 3” by Samantha E. Ball & Benjamin C Bromley (University of Utah, USA) and Scott J. Kenyon (Smithsonian Observatory, USA). This paper was published on Friday 22nd August in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. It describes a new search for symbiotic star candidates in Gaia Data Release 3 (GDR3), based on astrometric, photometric, and spectroscopic information. The overlay is here:

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

And that’s all the papers for this week. I suppose there will come a time when we publish a paper on every day of the week and each week’s summary will contain a paper in each of the astro-ph categories on arXiv, but we haven’t done that yet. This week we published on every day but Monday 18th August, and have papers in four of the six categories.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 16/08/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 16, 2025 by telescoper

It’s time once again for the usual update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics which I do every Saturday. Since the last update we have published two new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 116, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 351. The summer lull we always expected is now upon us, so this will be a shorter post than we have had of late.

The first paper to report this week is “The reflex instability: exponential growth of a large-scale mode in astrophysical discs” by Aurélien Crida (Université Côte d’Azur, France), Clément Baruteau (Université de Toulouse, France), Jean-François Gonzalez (Universite Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France), Frédéric Masset (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México) and Paul Segretain, Philippine Griveaud, Héloïse Méheut & Elena Lega (Université Côte d’Azur).  This paper was published on Tuesday August 12th 2025 in the folder marked “Earth and Planetary Astrophysics“. It discusses a exponentially-growing instability in gas discs around stars caused by the motion of the central star in response to the disc.

The overlay – which you can make larger by clicking on it – is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

The other paper this week, published in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, is “The galaxy-IGM connection in THESAN: the physics connecting the IGM Lyman-alpha opacity and galaxy density in the reionization epoch” by Enrico Garaldi (University of Tokyo, Japan), Verena Bellscheidt (Technical University of Munich, Germany), Aaron Smith (York University, Canada) and Rahul Kannan (University of Texas at Dallas, USA).  It presents a study of the relation between the Lyman-alpha effective optical depth of quasar sightlines and the distribution of galaxiesas as a probe of ionized regions around sources of photons. It was published on Wednesday August 13th 2025.

The overlay is here:

 

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

That concludes the papers for this week. I’ll do another update next weekend, though I expect things will remain relatively quiet until September.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 09/08/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 9, 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. Since the last update we have published four new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 114, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 349.

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 “Caught in the Act of Quenching? – A Population of Post-Starburst Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies” by Loraine Sandoval Ascencio & M. C. Cooper (UC Irvine), Dennis Zaritsky, Richard Donnerstein & Donghyeon J. Khim (U. Arizona) and Devontae C. Baxter (UC San Diego). This paper was puvblished on Monday 4th August and is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies. It discusses a sample of Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies (UDGs) found to be post-starburst galaxies through spectroscopic analysis analysis of candidates selected from the Systematically Measuring Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies (SMUDGes) program.

The overlay is here:

 

 

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

Next one up, published on Tuesday 5th August, in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, is “Damping Wing-Like Features in the Spectra of High Redshift Quasars: a Challenge for Fully-Coupled Simulations” by Nick Gnedin & Hanjue Zhu (University of Chicago, USA).  This paper presents a discussion of the difficulties that cosmological radiation transfer codes have in accounting for the existence of “neutral islands” in the universe at relatively low redshifts.

The overlay is here:

 

 

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

The third paper of the week is “Spectroscopic Analysis of Pictor II: a very low metallicity ultra-faint dwarf galaxy bound to the Large Magellanic Cloud” by Andrew Pace (U. Virginia, USA) and 32 others based in the USA, UK, Canada, Chile and Spain. This one was also published on Tuesday 5th August but in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It describes Magellan/IMACS and Magellan/MIKE spectroscopy of the ultra-faint dwarf (UFD) galaxy Pictor II, which is located only 12 kpc from the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).

The overlay is here:

 

The final version is on arXiv here.

The fourth, and final, paper of the week, also published on Thursday 7th August, is “ASASSN-24fw: An 8-month long, 4.1 mag, optically achromatic and polarized dimming event” by Raquel Forés-Toribio (Ohio State University) and 22 others based in the USA, Austria, Chile and Australia. It is published in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics, and it presents an observational study of an unusual dimming event likely to have been caused by eclipsing of a binary system by a dusty disk.

Here is the overlay:

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

And that’s all the papers for this week. I’ll do another update next Saturday.

P.S. For those of you who missed the post I did earlier in the week, I have been looking at the accounts for the Open Journal of Astrophysics and can confirm that the cost to us per paper is less than $30 and will reduce with scale. We expect to publish around 180 papers in 2025 for which the total cost incurred by OJAp will be around $5000. Obviously if we increase by a factor, say, ten then that amount would become significant so we are taking steps to secure additional funding in the event that happens.

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

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 2, 2025 by telescoper

It’s Saturday morning again, and it’s the start of a new month, so it’s time for an update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published five new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 110, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 345. I expect we’ll the total number we published last year (120) sometime this month. I predict that by the end of this year we will have published around 180 papers in Volume 8 and around 400 altogether.

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 matter with(in) CPL” by Leonardo Giani (U. Queensland, Australia), Rodrigo Von Marttens (Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil) and Oliver Fabio Piattella (Universita degli Studi dell’Insubria, Italy). This was published on Monday 29th July 2025 in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. This article presents a new parameterization of the standard model and its implications for the interpretation of cosmological observations.

The overlay is here:

 

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

The second paper of the week, published on Tuesday 30th July in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics, is “An automated method for finding the most distant quasars” by Lena Lenz, Daniel Mortlock, Boris Leistedt & Rhys Barnett (Imperial College London, UK) and Paul C. Hewett (U. Cambridge, UK)”.  This paper presents an automated, reproduceable and objective high-redshift quasar selection pipeline, tested on simulations and real data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS). The overlay is here:

 

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

The third paper of the week is “Early Post Asymptotic Giant Branch Instability: Does it Affect White Dwarf Hydrogen Envelope Mass?” by James MacDonald (University of Delaware, USA). This one was published on Friday 1st Auguest (i.e. yesterday) in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. It is an investigation into whether Early Post AGB Instability (EPAGBI) can affect determinations of the total abundance of hydrogen in white dwarf stars.

The overlay is here:

The final version is on arXiv here.

 

The fourth paper of the week, also published on Friday 1st August, is “Light Echoes of Time-resolved Flares and Application to Kepler Data” by Austin King and Benjamin C. Bromley (University of Utah, USA).  This describes a new model for circumstellar disks that incorporates echoes produced by extended, time-resolved flares. It is published in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. Here is the overlay:

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

 

 

The fifth and final article published this week, also published on Friday 1st August,  is “Wide Binaries from Gaia DR3 : testing GR vs MOND with realistic triple modelling” by Charalambos Pittordis, Will Sutherland and Paul Shepherd (Queen Mary, University of London, UK). This presents a test for modified gravity from a sample of wide-binary stars from Gaia DR3, finding that (unmodified) Newtonian gravity provides a better fit to the data. It is in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies.

The overlay is here:

 

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

And that’s all the papers for this week. I’ll do another update next Saturday.