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

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

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

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

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

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

The overlay is here:

 

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

 

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

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ArXiv, the Cloud and Backups

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , on April 24, 2025 by telescoper

Hidden in a job advertisement on the arXiv website for software developers is the news that

arXiv is in the midst of technological modernization to ensure longevity and scalability, and to improve our ability to support the scientific community. We are currently hiring software engineers and developers to work on the arXiv CE (“Cloud Edition”) project and our tech modernization efforts.

It seems that arXiv is going to be moved from local infrastructure at Cornell University to some sort of Google Cloud Platform. I’m not sure what to make of this move. For one thing, I’m deeply suspicious of Google so I hope that measures will be taken to ensure that arXiv remains freely accessible to the global scientific community. I suspect too that Google will use arXiv submissions as it uses everything placed in its control, to train AI. On the other hand, everything on arXiv is currently in the public domain anyway, and there has been evidence of attempts by bots to scrape its content already, causing a (temporary) degradation of service.

What all this means for the Open Journal of Astrophysics, I don’t know. I have however over the past several weeks been setting up several backups of all the papers published by OJAp in various repositories. We are an arXiv-overlay journal, but there’s no reason at all why the overlay model cannot be used with other repositories.

The decision to take these precautions was not motivated by arXiv’s move to the Cloud but by more general worries about the state of affairs in the USA right now. American universities are facing a number of attacks, as the current “Government” pursues an explicitly anti-scientific agenda, so I think it’s wise to consider the risk to Cornell being non-negligible. Obviously we can’t back up the entire arXiv repository, but I think we’ve made all OJAp papers as safe as possible in the event that anything happens to arXiv. I still think it’s unlikely we will need to use them so we’ll continue with arXiv for the forseeable future. Better safe than sorry!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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

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

Here is the overlay:

 

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

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

Here is the overlay:

 

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the overlay:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The overlay is here:

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

The overlay can be seen here:

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

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

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Weekly Update at the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 08/03/2025

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

Time for the weekly Saturday morning update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published four new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 25 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 260.

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 “Partition function approach to non-Gaussian likelihoods: information theory and state variables for Bayesian inference” by Rebecca Maria Kuntz, Heinrich von Campe, Tobias Röspel, Maximilian Philipp Herzog, and Björn Malte Schäfer, all from the University of Heidelberg (Germany). It was published on Wednesday March 5th 2025 in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics and it discusses the relationship between information theory and thermodynamics with applications to Bayesian inference in the context of cosmological data sets.

 

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

The second paper of the week  is “The Cosmological Population of Gamma-Ray Bursts from the Disks of Active Galactic Nuclei” by Hoyoung D. Kang & Rosalba Perna (Stony Brook), Davide Lazzati (Oregon State), and Yi-Han Wang (U. Nevada), all based in the USA. It was published on Thursday 6th March 2025 in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. The authors use models for GRB electromagnetic emission to simulate the cosmological occurrence and observational detectability of both long and short GRBs within AGN disks

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

The next two papers were published on Friday 7th March 2025.

“The distribution of misalignment angles in multipolar planetary nebulae” by Ido Avitan and Noam Soker (Technion, Haifa, Israel) analyzes the statistics of measured misalignment angles in multipolar planetary nebulae implies a random three-dimensional angle distribution limited to <60 degrees. It is in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics.

Here is the overlay:

 

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

The last paper to report this week is “The DESI-Lensing Mock Challenge: large-scale cosmological analysis of 3×2-pt statistics” by Chris Blake (Swinburne, Australia) and 43 others; this is a large international collaboration and I apologize for not being able to list all the authors here!

This one is in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics; it presents an end-to-end simulation study designed to test the analysis pipeline for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Year 1 galaxy redshift dataset combined with weak gravitational lensing from other surveys.

The overlay is here:

 

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

That’s all for this week. It’s good to see such an interesting variety of topics. I’ll do another update next Saturday

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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.

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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.

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