Archive for The Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on August 24, 2024 by telescoper

It’s Saturday morning so it’s time for the usual weekly update of publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Once again this week’s report will be short because there is only one paper to report this week, being  the 69th paper in Volume 7 (2024)  and the 184th  altogether. It was published on Wednesday 21st August 2024.

This week has been a bit strange, actually. We have actually accepted four papers that I was expecting to publish this week but only one has been published because the authors of the others have not yet put the final versions on arXiv. I suppose this is due to ongoing holidays and they’ll appear in due course. The other thing that happened was that when I published the paper below I discovered that the Crossref system was down for a scheduled upgrade that took a whole day to complete. Although I published the paper on 21st August I couldn’t register the metadata, etc, until 22nd August. Just as well I didn’t have more to do really!

Anyway, the title of the latest paper is is The compact circumstellar material of SN 2024ggi: another supernova with a pre-explosion effervescent zone and jet-driven explosion and it  is in the folder marked High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. The author is Noam Soker of Technion, Haifa, in Israel; the paper presents a possible explanation of then properties of recently-observed supernova SN 2024ggi.

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.

Four New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

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

It’s Saturday morning, so once again it’s time for an update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This week we have published another batch of four papers, the same number as last week, which takes the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 64 and the total published altogether by OJAp up to 179.

Before announcing the week’s papers I’ll add three other updates you might find interesting:

  1.  When I looked at NASA/ADS this morning to help construct this post I saw that papers published in OJAp have now garnered over 2500 citations between them;
  2. We had a good response to our recent call for new members of the Editorial Board and have added four new members here;
  3. Last week we received a significant (unsolicited) cash donation from a higher education institution based in Europe to help with our work in Diamond Open Access. If any other organizations or individuals would like to do similar then please contact me!

Now, in chronological order, 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: “Widespread disruption of resonant chains during protoplanetary disk dispersal by Bradley M S Hansen (UCLA), Tze-Yeung Yu (UCLA) and Yasuhiro Hasegawa (JPL), all based in California, USA.  The paper presents a discussion of the effect of a dispersing protoplanetary disk on the evolution of low-mass planets around a Solar mass star.  It was published on 21st July 2024 and is in the folder marked Earth and Planetary Astrophysics.

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 is “Using A One-Class SVM To Optimize Transit Detection” by Jakob Roche of the University of South Florida, also in the USA (but not in California). This articles discusses the advantages of One-Class Support Vector Machines (SVMs) over Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) in the context of exoplanet detection. Its in the folder called Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics and was published on 25th July 2024.

You can see the overlay here:

 

 

 

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

The next paper, also published on 25th July 2024, is in the folder marked High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. Its primary classification on arXiv is General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc), but it is cross-listed on astro-ph so we considered it for publication and had it refereed, with favourable results. It is entitled “What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse” and is by Katy Clough (QMUL, UK), Tim Dietrich (Potsdam, Germany) and Sebastian Khan (Cardiff, UK).  Looking at the title of this paper you might be tempted to dismiss it on the grounds that warp drives are the stuff of science fiction (which they are), but this paper is really a rigorous technical study of the dynamical evolution and stability of spacetimes that violate the null energy condition, inspired by the idea of a warp drive.

Here is the overlay:

 

 

You can find the full text for this one on the arXiv here.

Last, published on 26th July 2024, we have a paper with the title “A study of gamma-ray emission from OJ 287 using Fermi-LAT from 2015-2023” by Vibhavasu Pasumarti and Shantanu Desai of the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, India. It is an investigation of the properties of gamma-ray emission from OJ287 (a BL Lac object) using the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT).  This one is also in the folder marked High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena; here is the overlay

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

That’s all for this week. Stay tuned for another update next week.

Four New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

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

This week we have published four papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics, which I now present to you here. These four take the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 60 and the total published altogether by OJAp up to 175. It is gratifying to see the range of high-quality papers published steadily increasing. We are getting several papers submitted every day now.

In chronological order, 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 population of neutron star candidates in wide orbits from Gaia astrometry” by Kareem El-Badry (Caltech, USA) and 12 others based across the world.  The paper presents  a spectroscopic study of neutron star candidates identified using GAIA astrometry to be in wide binary orbits around main sequence stars,  was published on 15th July 2024 and is in the folder marked Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. For more information about this one, see here.

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 is “Systematic Effects in Galaxy-Galaxy Lensing with DESI” and was written by Johannes Ulf Lange (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA) and 58 others, again distributed internationally.  This one reports a study of systematic effects (such as incompleteness and intrinsic alignment) on galaxy-galaxy lensing results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey. This one is in the folder called Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics and was published on 16th July 2024.

You can see the overlay here:

 

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

The next paper is also in the folder called Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics.  It is entitled “Unleashing cosmic shear information with the tomographic weak lensing PDF” and is by by Lina Castiblanco (Newcastle Univresity, UK), Cora Uhlemann (Bielefeld University, Germany), Joachim Harnois-Déraps (Newcastle University, UK) and Alexandre Barthelemy (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Germany). This one was published on 17th July 2024.

Here is the overlay:

 

You can find the full text for this one on the arXiv here.

Last but by no means least, published on 18th July 2024, we have a paper  entitled “When to interfere with dark matter? The impact of wave dynamics on statistics“. The primary classification for this one is again Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics and it discusses the imprint of wave-mechanical behaviour, perhaps associated with ultra-light scalar field dark matter on the statistical properties of large-scale structure. The authors are Alex Gough (Newcastle University, UK) and Cora Uhlemann (Bielefeld University, Germany; who also featured in the author list of the previous paper). This is a paper close to my own interests, but because I know both authors well and was the PhD examiner of the first author I thought it best to recuse myself from an editorial role on this one.

 

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.

It did look likely at one stage that we might publish a paper every day last week, but the final version of one other paper didn’t make it onto arXiv in time to be announced on Friday so I will publish that one on Monday.

Two New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , on July 13, 2024 by telescoper

Another Saturday, another update of the  Open Journal of Astrophysics.  Since the last update we have published two more papers, taking  the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 56 and the total published by OJAp up to 171.  Both these papers were published on Thursday 11th July 2024.

The first paper of the most recent pair, published on July 3rd 2024,  is “Sunyaev-Zeldovich signatures from non-thermal, relativistic electrons using CMB maps” by Sandeep Kumar Acharya of The Open University of Israel, Ra’anana, Israel.  This article presents a discussion the possible effects of non-thermal electron energy distributions on the form of Sunyaev-Zeldovich distortions and how they might be measured. The paper is in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics.

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 has the title “On the contribution of dwarf galaxies to reionization of the Universe” and is by Zewei Wu and Andrey Kravtsov of the University of Chicago in the USA. This paper, which is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies, presents a model of galaxy formation that suggests that radiation from very faint galaxies may contribute significantly to the reionization of the Universe.

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. No doubt I’ll have more for you next week!

Call for Editors at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 7, 2024 by telescoper

Just over halfway into 2024 the number of papers submitted to the Open Journal of Astrophysics continues to rise, as demonstrated by this nice graphic which shows the submission stats for the last five years:

The increasing number of articles is of course very welcome indeed, but it is increasing the load on our Editorial Board and that includes me! We’re therefore looking for volunteers to join the team, in any area of astrophysics. As a reminder, here are the areas we cover, corresponding to the sections of astro-ph on the arXiv:

  1. astro-ph.GA – Astrophysics of Galaxies. Phenomena pertaining to galaxies or the Milky Way. Star clusters, HII regions and planetary nebulae, the interstellar medium, atomic and molecular clouds, dust. Stellar populations. Galactic structure, formation, dynamics. Galactic nuclei, bulges, disks, halo. Active Galactic Nuclei, supermassive black holes, quasars. Gravitational lens systems. The Milky Way and its contents
  2. astro-ph.CO – Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. Phenomenology of early universe, cosmic microwave background, cosmological parameters, primordial element abundances, extragalactic distance scale, large-scale structure of the universe. Groups, superclusters, voids, intergalactic medium. Particle astrophysics: dark energy, dark matter, baryogenesis, leptogenesis, inflationary models, reheating, monopoles, WIMPs, cosmic strings, primordial black holes, cosmological gravitational radiation
  3. astro-ph.EP – Earth and Planetary Astrophysics. Interplanetary medium, planetary physics, planetary astrobiology, extrasolar planets, comets, asteroids, meteorites. Structure and formation of the solar system
  4. astro-ph.HE – High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. Cosmic ray production, acceleration, propagation, detection. Gamma ray astronomy and bursts, X-rays, charged particles, supernovae and other explosive phenomena, stellar remnants and accretion systems, jets, microquasars, neutron stars, pulsars, black holes
  5. astro-ph.IM – Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. Detector and telescope design, experiment proposals. Laboratory Astrophysics. Methods for data analysis, statistical methods. Software, database design
  6. astro-ph.SR – Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. White dwarfs, brown dwarfs, cataclysmic variables. Star formation and protostellar systems, stellar astrobiology, binary and multiple systems of stars, stellar evolution and structure, coronas. Central stars of planetary nebulae. Helioseismology, solar neutrinos, production and detection of gravitational radiation from stellar systems.

We are looking for experienced scientists in any of these areas, and it would indeed be useful to have people who can cover a range of subjects (as some of our existing editors do), but there are two specific topics that have seen a big increase recently: (a) galaxy formation simulations (especially involving hydrodynamics) covered by astro-ph.CO; and (b) galactic dynamics, covered by astro-ph.GA. The latter increase is driven Gaia data, an immensely rich source for discovery science.

Since we don’t charge authors or readers we can not offer payment to Editors but it is nevertheless a way of providing a service to the community.

Please get in touch either through the Open Journal website here, or through a message Mastodon here, BlueSky here, or Facebook here. You could even send a message through this form:

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨

Two New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , on July 6, 2024 by telescoper

My own laptop is still with the menders but I’ve managed to borrow one until I get it back so I don’t get too far behind. Anyway, it’s Saturday morning, and once again 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 54 and the total published by OJAp up to 169.  There was one less arXiv update than usual last week, owing to the holiday on July 4th, so a couple of papers have been delayed.

The first paper of the most recent pair, published on July 3rd 2024,  is “Recovering 21cm Monopole Signals Without Smoothness” by Rugved Pund & Anže Slosar (Stony Brook, NY, USA) and Aaron Parsons (Berkeley, CA, USA) . This paper presents a new method for identifying the ‘Dark Ages’ trough contribution to the monopole of the 21cm radiation background that does not rely on the assumption that the spectrum is smooth. The paper is in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics.

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, also published on 3rd July, has the title “LtU-ILI: An All-in-One Framework for Implicit Inference in Astrophysics and Cosmology”. There are fifteen authors with primary affiliations as follows: Matthew Ho (IAP, Paris, France), Deaglan J. Bartlett (IAP, Paris, France), Nicolas Chartier (Seoul National University, Korea),  Carolina Cuesta-Lazaro (Cfa, Harvard, USA),  Simon Ding (IAP, Paris, France), Axel Lapel (IAP, Paris, France), Pablo Lemos (Université de Montréal, Canada), Christopher C. Lovell (University of Portsmouth, UK),  T. Lucas Makinen (Imperial College, London, UK), Chirag Modi (Flatiron Institute, NY, USA), Viraj Pandya (Columbia University, NY, USA), Shivam Pandey (Columbia University, NY, USA), Lucia A. Perez (Flatiron Institute, NY, USA), Benjamin Wandelt (IAP, Paris, France),  and Greg L. Bryan (Sorbonne Université, Paris, France).

This paper, which is in the folder marked Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics, presents a suite of software for rapid, user-friendly, and cutting-edge inference using machine learning in astrophysics and cosmology. The software can be found on Github here.

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. No doubt I’ll have more for you next week!

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on June 29, 2024 by telescoper

It’s a rainy Saturday morning here in Barcelona, and here’s the last update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics before I depart these shores. In fact there is only one paper to report this week, being  the 52nd paper in Volume 7 (2024)  and the 167th altogether. It was published on June 24th 2024. With six months of the year now over, I predict we will have published about 52×12/6=104 papers by the end of the year.

The title is “Comparing Mass Mapping Reconstruction Methods with Minkowski Functionals” and it  is in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. The authors are: Nisha Grewal (U. Edinburgh, UK), Joe Zuntz (U. Edinburgh, UK) and Tilman Tröster (ETH Zurich, Switzerland);  the paper is about quantifying the accuracy, precision and efficiency of lensing reconstruction methods using topological characteristics known as Minkowski Fuctionals.

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.

P.S. Since I only had the one paper to publicize this week I took a few minutes to add the overlays to last week’s post, which I couldn’t do at the time because of computer problems.

Recent Citations in Astrophysics

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , , , , on June 27, 2024 by telescoper

When I was on the train yesterday I thought I’d pass the time by looking up some numbers to answer a question someone asked me after my seminar in Valencia. I thought the results were Quite Interesting so I thought I would share them here. Just for fun I worked out the average number of citations so far for all papers published in 2023 in the “leading” astrophysics journals:

JournalMean citations per paperMedian citations per paper
ApJ6.23
MNRAS6.94
A&A7.74
OJAp8.45
Source: NASA/ADS

I suspect these numbers don’t turn out the way most people would have imagined! I don’t think you should infer too much from these figures because the window for citations is very narrow, but they do demonstrate that there’s no evidence that papers in the Open Journal of Astrophysics attract any less attention than those in more mainstream journals.

Two New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 15, 2024 by telescoper

It’s Saturday morning in Barcelona, and 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 47 and the total published by OJAp up to 162. We actually accepted four papers last week, but so far only two final versions have appeared on the arXiv.

The first paper of the most recent pair – published on  Friday 14th June – is “Spectroscopic Confirmation of an Ultra-Massive Galaxy in a Protocluster at z 4.9″ . The author list has a strong University of California flavour: Stephanie M. Urbano Stawinski (UC Irvine), M. C. Cooper (UC Irvine), Ben Forrest (UC Davis) , Adam Muzzin (York University, Canada), Danilo Marchesini (Tufts University), Gillian Wilson (UC Merced), Percy Gomez (Keck Observatories, USA), Ian McConachie (UC Riverside), Z. Cemile Marsan (York University, Canada), Marianna Annuziatella (Centro de Astrobiología CSIC-INTA, Spain) and Wenjun Chang (UC Riverside).

This paper presents an investigation of a cluster system involving a massive galaxy using Keck spectroscopy with determination of its redshift and star formation properties. The results pose a challenge for theorists. The paper 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, also published on Friday 14th June and has the title “Boil-off of red supergiants: mass loss and type II-P supernovae” by Jim Fuller (Caltech) and  Daichi Tsuna (Caltech, USA and University of Tokyo, Japan). This one, which is in the folder marked Solar and Stellar Astrophysics, discusses A new model for stellar mass loss which predicts that low-mass red supergiants lose less mass than commonly assumed, while high-mass red supergiants lose more.

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. Will we reach 50 for 20204 next week? Tune in next Saturday to find out!

Three New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 8, 2024 by telescoper

Time for another roundup of business at the  Open Journal of Astrophysics. This time I have three papers to announce, which brings the total we have published so far this year (Vol. 7) to 45 and the total published by OJAp to 160. We’re still on track to publish around 100 papers this year or more, compared to last year’s 50.

First one up, published on 3rd June 2024, is “Log-Normal Waiting Time Widths Characterize Dynamics” by Jonathan Katz of Washington University (St Louis, Missouri, USA). This paper presents a discussion of the connection between waiting time distributions and dynamics for aperiodic astrophysical systems, with emphasis on log-normal distributions.  This paper is in the folder marked High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena.

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 present is “An Empirical Model For Intrinsic Alignments: Insights From Cosmological Simulations” by Nicholas Van Alfen (Northeastern University, Boston, USA), Duncan Campbell (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA), Jonathan Blazek (Northeastern University), C. Danielle Leonard (Newcastle University, UK), Francois Lanusse (Université Paris-Saclay, France), Andrew Hearin (Argonne National Laboratory, USA), Rachel Mandelbaum (Carnegie Mellon University) and The LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration.  This paper presents an extension of the halo model (specifically the Halo Occupation Distribution, HOD) to include intrinsic alignment effects for the study of weak gravitational lensing. This paper is in the folder marked Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. It was published on Tuesday June 4th 2024.

The overlay looks like this:

 

 

You can read this paper directly on the arXiv here.

Last, but by no means least, comes  “Towards Cosmography of the Local Universe”  which proposes the multipoles of the distance-redshift relation as new cosmological observables that have a direct physical interpretation in terms of kinematical quantities of the underlying matter flow. This was also published on 4th June. The authors are Julian Adamek (IfA Zurich, Switzerland), Chris Clarkson (Queen Mary, London, UK), Ruth Durrer (Geneva, Switzerland), Asta Heinesen (U. Lyon, France & NBI Copenhagen, Denmark), Martin Kunz (Geneva), and Hayley J. Macpherson (Chicago, USA).

Here is a screengrab of the overlay:

 

 

To read the accepted version of this on the arXiv please go here. This paper is also in the folder marked Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics.
That’s it for this week. I aim to post another update next weekend.