It’s Saturday again so it’s time for another update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further four papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 126 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 574.
I will continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also show the DOI for each paper.
The first paper to report this week, published on Monday 15th June, is “SN 2025adpq: A Type Ia supernova in a collisional ring formed during a major galaxy merger” by Brendan O’Connor (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) and 18 others based in the USA, Germany and Australia. The study reports the discovery of a Type Ia supernova, SN 2025adpq, within a collisional ring formed by a major galaxy merger., offset from the nucleus of the primary galaxy. It is published in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies.
The overlay for this paper is here
You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "SN 2025adpq: A Type Ia supernova in a collisional ring formed during a major galaxy merger" by Brendan O'Connor (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) and 18 others based in the USA, Germany and Australia
The second paper for this week, published on Tuesday June 16th in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies is “The Colors of Ices: Measuring ice column density through photometry” by Adam Ginsburg (U. Florida, USA) and ten others based in the USA, Germany and Spain. This study demonstrates that JWST photometry can identify and quantify interstellar ices, using new open-source models, interstellar ices, finding significant abundance in non-star-forming gas, suggesting many avenues for further research.
The overlay looks like this:
The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "The Colors of Ices: Measuring ice column density through photometry" by Adam Ginsburg (U. Florida, USA) and ten others based in the USA, Germany and Spain
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "The Non-Gaussian Weak-Lensing Likelihood: A Multivariate Copula Construction and Impact on Cosmological Constraints" by Veronika Oehl and Tilman Tröster (ETH Zurich, Switzerland)
The fourth and final paper of the week, also ublished on Wednesday 17th June but in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “Black Hole Feedback, Galaxy Quenching and Outflows at Cosmic Dawn: Analysis of the SEEDZ Simulations” by Lewis R. Prole (Maynooth University, Ireland) and 15 others based in Ireland, Germany, USA and UK. The study analyzes the growth and feedback effects of massive black holes in SEEDZ simulations, suggesting that black hole feedback, not nearby supernovae or gas exhaustion, limits initial growth.
The overlay is here:
The final, accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Black Hole Feedback, Galaxy Quenching and Outflows at Cosmic Dawn: Analysis of the SEEDZ Simulations" by Lewis R. Prole (Maynooth University, Ireland) and 15 others based in Ireland, Germany, USA and UK.
And that concludes this week’s update. It has been another slow week on the publishing front, but the main reason is that we have a big backlog of papers accepted – about 10 of them – but still waiting for the authors to put their final versions on arXiv and we can’t do anything about that! I’ll do another update next Saturday.
I’ve been slow onto a result which was announced last week concerning the detection weak gravitational lensing in the cluster Abell 2390 by the Euclid spacecraft and its use to determine the distribution of dark matter in the cluster. You can find a full discussion of the result here and the scientific paper is here.
The analysis was based on Early Release Observations of the cluster, a pretty picture of which are shown here:
Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi.
(The little blue patches are artefacts caused by internal reflections in the VIS instrument and can be dealt with in software.)
According to general relativity, the presence of any mass bends the path of light passing near it, producing gravitational lensing. The most famous examples of this are the giant arcs and multiple images associated with strong gravitational lensing, but these are very rare as they require good alignment between observer, lens and source.. Most lines of sight in the universe do not satisfy this condition so are in the weak lensing regime. Even in such cases, however, the presence of the foreground mass can be detected, by way of a systematic alignment in the orientation of background sources around the lensing mass. A circular background image would be distorted into an ellipse by this process. Unfortunately galaxies aren’t circular but are approximately elliptical, so the shape of each source is changed from an ellipse to differently shaped ellipse. The distortion is therefore impossible to detect in a single background source because we don’t know the intrinsic orientation of the galaxy, but the distortion of different sources is correlated in a particular way. Weak gravitational lensing is thus an intrinsically statistical measurement, but it provides a way to measure the masses of astronomical objects without requiring assumptions about their composition or dynamical state. Weak gravitational lensing observations are, however technically difficult to carry out and analyse, as one has to be very careful that no correlations are introduced by systematic errors in the optics.
Anyway, they say that a picture paints a thousand words so here are two pictures. On the left we see the shear axes as extracted from the above image and on the right the inferred dark matter distribution. You can slide the bar backwards and forwards to see how the two images relate.
Shear map (left) and inferred dark matter distribution (right)
You can see that the shear tends to be aligned tangentially to a line connecting the image to the cluster centre (in the plane of the sky), which is what theory would predict.
There’ll be much more of this sort of analysis in the full Euclid Survey. I hope to be able to give an update about this reasonably soon.
It’s Saturday once again, so it’s time for another update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further four papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 114 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 562.
I will continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also show the DOI for each paper.
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Little Red Dot – Host Galaxy = Black Hole Star: A Gas-Enshrouded Heart at the Center of Every Little Red Dot" by Wendy Q. Sun (MIT, USA) and 32 others from around the world.
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Catalog-based detection of unrecognized blends in deep optical ground based imaging" by Shuang Liang (Stanford U., USA) and Prakruth Adari & Anja von der Linden (Stony Brook U., USA) on behalf of the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration
Next one up, the third paper of the week, published on Tuesday 26th May in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics is “Control variates from Eulerian and Lagrangian perturbation theory: Application to the bispectrum” by Nickolas Kokron and Shi-Fan Chen (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA). This paper hexplores the use of control variates in cosmological simulations, introducing a new ‘shifted control variate’ that improves precision and enables accurate bispectrum emulators, aiding in cosmology modeling.
The overlay for this one is here:
The final, accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Probing Dark Energy Microphysics with kSZ Tomography" by Julius Adolff, Selim Hotinli and Neal Dalal (Perimeter Institute, Canada)
The fourth and final paper this week, also published on Tuesday 26th May is “How precisely can we measure the ages of subgiant and giant stars?” by Cheyanne Shariat, Kareem El-Badry and Soumyadeep Bhattacharjee (California Institute of Technology, USA). This article, published in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics, is about testing the accuracy of stellar age estimates from recent catalogs, finding that spectroscopic metallicities provide reliable subgiant ages, while photometric ages underestimate uncertainties. Accurate chemical abundance measurements are essential.
The overlay is here:
The officially accepted version can be found on arXiv here and here is the Mastodon announcement:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "How precisely can we measure the ages of subgiant and giant stars?" by Cheyanne Shariat, Kareem El-Badry and Soumyadeep Bhattacharjee (California Institute of Technology, USA)
It’s Saturday once again, so time for another update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further six papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 110 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 558.
I will continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also show the DOI for each paper.
The first paper to report this week, published on Monday 18th May in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics is “Edges In Coadded Images” by Erin Sheldon (Brookhaven National Laboratory, USA). This paper describes a study exploring how image discontinuities and noise impact weak gravitational lensing measurements, finding no significant biases under typical conditions. Biases occur only in extreme cases, but can be mitigated.
The overlay for this paper is here
You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Joint cosmological fits to DESI-DR1 full-shape clustering and weak gravitational lensing in configuration space " by A. Semenaite (Swinburne Institute of Technology, Australia) and 72 others from all round the world.
Next one up, the third paper of the week, and the third published on Monday 18th May, and in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics is “Probing Dark Energy Microphysics with kSZ Tomography” by Julius Adolff, Selim Hotinli and Neal Dalal (all of the Perimeter Institute, Canada). This paper explores how kinetic Sunyaev-Zel’dovich tomography and galaxy clustering can enhance our understanding of dark energy and its effects, potentially revealing its microphysical properties in future surveys.
The overlay for this one is here:
The final, accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Probing Dark Energy Microphysics with kSZ Tomography" by Julius Adolff, Selim Hotinli and Neal Dalal (Perimeter Institute, Canada)
The fourth paper this week, published on Wednesday May 20th is “A Census of Variable Radio Sources at 3 GHz” by Yjan A. Gordon, Peter S. Ferguson, Michael N. Martinez and Eric J. Hooper (all of the University of Wisconsin, USA). This article, published in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, uses data from the Very Large Array Sky Survey to analyze variability in the radio sky, finding most changes consistent with blazars and quasars.
The overlay is here:
The officially accepted version can be found on arXiv here and here is the Mastodon announcement:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "A Census of Variable Radio Sources at 3 GHz" by Yjan A. Gordon, Peter S. Ferguson, Michael N. Martinez & Eric J. Hooper (U. Wisconsin, USA)
The fifth article of this week was published on Friday 22nd May in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. The title is “Uncovering the Next Galactic Supernova with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory” by John Banovetz (Lawrence Berkeley Lab., USA), Claire-Alice Hebert & Peter B. Denton (Brookhaven National Lab., USA), Dan Scolnic (Duke University, USA), Anze Slosar (Brookhaven) and Chris Walter (Duke). The paper presents a study simulating how effectively the Vera C. Rubin Observatory can localize supernovae using neutrino triggers, finding a 57-97% success rate based on stellar mass density predictions.
The overlay is here:
You can find the authorized version of this paper on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement is here:
New Publlication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Uncovering the Next Galactic Supernova with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory" by John Banovetz (Lawrence Berkeley Lab., USA), Claire-Alice Hebert & Peter B. Denton (Brookhaven National Lab., USA) , Dan Scolnic (Duke U., USA) , Anze Slosar (Brookhaven), and Chris Walter (Duke)
Last, but by no means least, this week we have “Pulsar timing solutions for 17 pulsars at 150 MHz from the Irish LOFAR station” by David J. McKenna (ASTRON, The Netherlands), Evan F. Keane (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland), Peter T. Gallagher (DIAS, Ireland) and Joe McCauley (Trinity). This was published on Friday 22nd May in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. It presents a demonstration of the use of international Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) stations in tracking and characterizing pulsars, providing new insights into these neutron stars’ emission properties.
The overlay for this one is here:
You can find the authorized version of this paper on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement is here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Pulsar timing solutions for 17 pulsars at 150 MHz from the Irish LOFAR station" by David J. McKenna (ASTRON, The Netherlands), Evan F. Keane (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland), Peter T. Gallagher (DIAS, Ireland) and Joe McCauley (Trinity)
It’s Saturday once again, so time for another update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further five papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 99 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 547. We didn’t quite make it to a hundred for the year last week, but will do so with the next paper.
I will continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience) to encourage you to visit it. Mastodon is a really excellent service, and a more than adequate replacement for X/Twitter (which nobody should be using); these announcements also show the DOI for each paper.
The first paper to report this week is “Formation of Close Binaries through Massive Black Hole Perturbations and Chaotic Tides” by Howard Hao-Tse Huang and Wenbin Lu (University of California at Berkeley, USA). This one was published on Wednesday 6th May 2026 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The paper presents a model of massive black hole-binary systems, showing that repeated tidal interactions can lead to the creation of hyper-velocity stars and other nuclear transients.
The overlay for this paper is here
You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Formation of Close Binaries through Massive Black Hole Perturbations and Chaotic Tides" by Howard Hao-Tse Huang & Wenbin Lu (U. California Berkeley, USA)
The second paper for this week, also Wednesday 6th May, but in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics is “Detection of supernova magnitude fluctuations induced by large-scale structure” by Andrew Nguyen (Swinburne Institute of Technology, Australia) and 58 others based all around the world. This study uses supernovae and galaxy velocities to measure the universe’s structure growth rate, confirming the Planck LambdaCDM model prediction. The methodology is validated and shows potential for future research.
The overlay for this one is here:
The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Detection of supernova magnitude fluctuations induced by large-scale structure" by Andrew Nguyen (Swinburne Institute of Technology, Australia) and 58 others based all around the world.
Next one up, the third paper of the week, also published on Wednesday 6th May in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics is “Comparing cosmic shear nulling methods for Stage-IV surveys” by Naomi Clare Robertson and Alex Hall (University of Edinburgh, UK). This study compares three strategies for reducing baryon feedback impact on cosmic shear measurements. All methods effectively mitigate bias, with varying degrees of efficiency and information preservation.
The overlay for this one is here:
The final, accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Comparing cosmic shear nulling methods for Stage-IV surveys" by Naomi Clare Robertson & Alex Hall (U. Edinburgh, UK)
The fourth paper this week, published on Thursday May 7th, is “Egent: An Autonomous Agent for Equivalent Width Measurement” by Yuan-Sen Ting & Serat Mahmud Saad (Ohio State University, USA), Fan Liu (National Astronomical Observatories, Beijing, China), and Yuting Shen (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA). Egent is an autonomous agent that combines multi-Voigt profile fitting with large language model visual inspection for efficient, automated analysis of raw flux spectra, validated against expert measurements. This one is in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. The associated software can be found here.
The overlay is here:
The officially accepted version can be found on arXiv here and here is the Mastodon announcement:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Egent: An Autonomous Agent for Equivalent Width Measurement" by Yuan-Sen Ting & Serat Mahmud Saad (Ohio State U., USA), Fan Liu (National Astronomical Observatories, China) and Yuting Shen (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)
The fifth and final article of this week was published on Friday 8th May in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The title is “DiffstarPop: A generative physical model of galaxy star formation history” and it is by Alex Alarcon (Institute of Space Sciences, Barcelona, Spain), Andrew P. Hearin , Matthew R. Becker & Gillian Beltz-Mohrmann (Argonne National Laborarory, USA), and Andrew Benson & Sachi Weerasooriya (Carnegie Observatories, USA). DiffstarPop is a model that accurately and rapidly reproduces statistical distributions of galaxy star formation histories (SFH), using parameters related to galaxy formation physics.
The overlay is here:
You can find the authorized version of this paper on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement is here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "DiffstarPop: A generative physical model of galaxy star formation history" by Alex Alarcon (Institute of Space Sciences, Barcelona, Spain), Andrew P. Hearin , Matthew R. Becker & Gillian Beltz-Mohrmann (Argonne National Laborarory, USA), and Andrew Benson & Sachi Weerasooriya (Carnegie Observatories, USA)
Here we are, on schedule, with another update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further seven papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 94 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 542. I checked the corresponding update for last year (on 3rd May 2025), and we’ve had an increase from 54 to 94 in papers published (about 74%) between the first four months of 2025 and the first four months of 2026.
I will continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience) to encourage you to visit it. Mastodon is a really excellent service, and a more than adequate replacement for X/Twitter (which nobody should be using); these announcements also show the DOI for each paper.
The first paper to report this week is “DESI-DR1 3 × 2-pt analysis: consistent cosmology across weak lensing surveys” by Anna Porredon (CIEMAT, Madrid, Spain) and 72 others (DESI Colllaboration). This paper was published on Tuesday 28th April in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. This paper presents a joint cosmological analysis of galaxy clustering and gravitational lensing observations, providing consistent constraints on cosmological parameters. The analysis also introduces a new blinding procedure to prevent confirmation bias. See this post for news of an important DESI milestone.
The overlay for this paper is here
You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "DESI-DR1 3 × 2-pt analysis: consistent cosmology across weak lensing surveys" by Anna Porredon (CIEMAT, Madrid, Spain) and 72 others (DESI Colllaboration)
The second paper for this week, also published on Tuesday 28th April but in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena is “Masers and Broad-Line Mapping Favor Magnetically-Dominated AGN Accretion Disks” by Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech, USA), Dalya Baron (Stanford U., USA) and Joanna M. Piotrowska (Caltech). This one presents a new constraint on supermassive black hole accretion disks physics, suggesting that outer regions are likely in a ‘hyper-magnetized’ state, as thermal or radiation pressure models appear inconsistent.
The overlay for this one is here:
The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Masers and Broad-Line Mapping Favor Magnetically-Dominated AGN Accretion Disks" by Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech, USA), Dalya Baron (Stanford U., USA) and Joanna M. Piotrowska (Caltech)
Next one up, the third paper of the week, is “Galaxy mergers and disk angular momentum evolution: stellar halos as a critical test” by Eric F. Bell (U. Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA), Richard D’Souza (Vatican Observatory), Monica Valluri & Katya Gozman (U. Michigan). This was published on Wednesday 29th April in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The paper argues that satellite accretion impacts the angular momentum evolution of galaxies, often causing significant reorientation. This process is detectable in Milky Way-mass galaxies so the idea is testable observationally.
The overlay for this one is here:
The final, accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Galaxy mergers and disk angular momentum evolution: stellar halos as a critical test" by Eric F. Bell (U. Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA), Richard D'Souza (Vatican Observatory), Monica Valluri & Katya Gozman (U. Michigan)
The fourth paper this week, published on Thursday April 30th, is “Time-Dilation Methods for Extreme Multiscale Timestepping Problems” by Philip F. Hopkins and Elias R. Most (Caltech, USA). This paper is in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics: it presents a new method for astrophysical simulations that modulates time evolution with a variable dilation/stretch factor, improving efficiency and accuracy in modeling processes across different scales.
The overlay is here:
The finally accepted version of this paper can be found here and the Mastodon announcement follows:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Time-Dilation Methods for Extreme Multiscale Timestepping Problems" by Philip F. Hopkins and Elias R. Most (Caltech, USA)
The fifth article of this week was also published on Thursday 30th April, but in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The title is “Cosmic Rays on Galaxy Scales: Progress and Pitfalls for CR-MHD Dynamical Models” and the author is Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech, USA) who has three papers featured this week. The paper presents an overview of cosmic ray (CR) modeling, highlighting its influence on galactic physics and star formation. It addresses previous modeling errors and presents new methods for full-spectrum dynamics.
The overlay is here:
You can find the authorized version of this paper on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement is here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Cosmic Rays on Galaxy Scales: Progress and Pitfalls for CR-MHD Dynamical Models" by Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech, USA)
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Baryonification III: An accurate analytical model for the dispersion measure probability density function of fast radio bursts" by MohammadReza Torkamani (Universität Bonn, Germany) and 8 others based in Germany, Switzerland, UK and Sweden
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "The stellar and dark matter distributions in early-type galaxies measured by stacked weak gravitational lensing" by Momoka Fujikawa & Masamune Oguri (Chiba University, Japan)
It may be the Easter weekend, but it’s still time for a Saturday morning update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further four papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 71 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 519. This update coimpletes the first quarter of 2026, which suggests that if we continue to publish at the same rate we’ll reach about 280 for the year.
I will continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience) to encourage you to visit it. Mastodon is a really excellent service, and a more than adequate replacement for X/Twitter (which nobody should be using); these announcements also show the DOI for each paper.
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Testing halo models for constraining astrophysical feedback with multi-probe modeling: I. 3D Power spectra and mass fractions" by Pranjal R. S. (U. Arizona, USA), Shivam Pandey Johns Hopkins U., USA), Dhayaa Anbajagane (U. Chicago, USA), Elisabeth Krause (U. Arizona) and Klaus Dolag (Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Germany)
The second paper for this week, also published on Tuesday March 31st in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, is “Validation of the DESI-DR1 3×2-pt analysis: scale cut and shear ratio tests” by Ni Putu Audita Placida Emas (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia) and an international cast of 56 others. This study validates the combined analysis of galaxy clustering and weak gravitational lensing data from various surveys, ensuring accurate tests of the standard cosmological model using future Stage-IV surveys
The overlay for this one is here:
The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Validation of the DESI-DR1 3×2-pt analysis: scale cut and shear ratio tests" by Ni Putu Audita Placida Emas (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia) and an international cast of 56 others.
Next one up, the third paper of the week, also published on Tuesday March 31st in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, is “Differentiable Stochastic Halo Occupation Distribution with Galaxy Intrinsic Alignments” by Sneh Pandya and Jonathan Blazek (both of Northeastern University, USA). This is a paper introducing diffHOD-IA, a differentiable model for galaxy population analysis that incorporates intrinsic alignments and halo occupation distribution. It’s validated against existing models and can be used in next-generation weak-lensing analyses.
The overlay for this one is here:
The final, accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Differentiable Stochastic Halo Occupation Distribution with Galaxy Intrinsic Alignments" by Sneh Pandya and Jonathan Blazek (Northeastern U., USA)
The fourth and final paper this week, published on Wednesday April 1st (but not a joke), is “The Growth of Dust in Galaxies in the First Billion Years with Applications to Blue Monsters” by Desika Narayanan (U. Florida, USA) and 11 others based in the USA and Europe. This one is in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies; it presents a simulation-based study of dust accumulation in early galaxies via supernovae production and rapid growth on tiny dust grains, with local density and grain size being important factors.
The overlay is here:
The finally accepted version of this paper can be found here and the Mastodon announcement is here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "The Growth of Dust in Galaxies in the First Billion Years with Applications to Blue Monsters" by Desika Narayanan (U. Florida, USA) and 11 others based in the USA and Europe.
It’s Saturday once more so time for another update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published seven papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 11 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 459. This week has been quite busy; for only the second time in recorded history we published at least one paper each working day.
I will continue to include the announcements made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience) to encourage you to visit it. Mastodon is a really excellent service, and a more than adequate replacement for X/Twitter which nobody should be using.
The first three papers this week were all published on Monday January 12th in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies.
The first paper to report this week is “Rotational Kinematics in the Globular Cluster System of M31: Insights from Bayesian Inference” by Yuan (Cher) Li & Brendon J. Brewer (U. Auckland, New Zealand), Geraint F. Lewis (U. Sydney, Australia) and Dougal Mackey (independent researcher, Australia). This study uses Bayesian modelling to explore the kinematics of globular clusters in the Andromeda Galaxy, revealing distinct rotation patterns that suggest different subgroups were added at separate times.
The overlay is here:
You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Rotational Kinematics in the Globular Cluster System of M31: Insights from Bayesian Inference" by Yuan (Cher) Li & Brendon J. Brewer (U. Auckland, New Zealand), Geraint F. Lewis (U. Sydney, Australia) and Dougal Mackey
The second paper is “DESI Data Release 1: Stellar Catalogue” by Sergey Koposov (U. Edinburgh, UK) and an international cast of 67 other authors. This paper introduces and describes the stellar Value-Added Catalogue (VAC) based on DESI Data Release 1, providing measurements for over 4 million stars, including radial velocity, abundance, and stellar parameters.
The overlay for this one is here:
The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "DESI Data Release 1: Stellar Catalogue" by Sergey Koposov (U. Edinburgh, UK) and an international cast of 67 other authors.
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "On the origins of oxygen: ALMA and JWST characterise the multi-phase, metal-enriched, star-bursting medium within a ‘normal’ z>11 galaxy" by Joris Witstok (Cosmic Dawn Centre, Copenhagen, Denmark) and 37 others dotted around the world
The fourth paper this week is also in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. but was published on Tuesday 13th January. It is entitled “Accelerated calibration of semi-analytic galaxy formation models” by Andrew Robertson and Andrew Benson (Carnegie Observatories, USA). This paper presents a faster calibration framework for galaxy formation models, using fewer simulations for each evaluation. However, the model shows discrepancies suggesting the model needs to be made more flexible.
The overlay is here:
You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Accelerated calibration of semi-analytic galaxy formation models" by Andrew Robertson and Andrew Benson (Carnegie Observatories, USA)
Next one up, published on Wednesday 14th January in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, is “Constraints from CMB lensing tomography with projected bispectra” by Lea Harscouet & David Alonso (U. Oxford), UK), Andrina Nicola (U. Manchester, UK) and Anže Slosar (Brookhaven National Laboratory, USA). This study presents angular power spectra and bispectra of DESI luminous red galaxies, finding that the galaxy bispectrum can constrain the amplitude of matter fluctuations and the non-relativistic matter fraction. The overlay is here:
You can find the officially accepted paper on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Constraints from CMB lensing tomography with projected bispectra" by Lea Harscouet & David Alonso (U. Oxford, UK), Andrina Nicola (U. Manchester, UK) and Anže Slosar (Brookhaven National Laboratory, USA)
The sixth paper this week is “Universal numerical convergence criteria for subhalo tidal evolution” by Barry T. Chiang & Frank C. van den Bosch (Yale U., USA) and Hsi-Yu Schive (National Taiwan University, Taiwan). This was published on Thursday 15th January in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics; it presents an analysis of a simulation suite that addresses the ‘overmerging’ problem in cosmological simulations of dark matter subhalos, showing that up to 50% of halos in state-of-the art simulations are unresolved. The overlay is here:
The final accepted version of this paper can be found on arXiv here. The Mastodon announcement follows:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Universal numerical convergence criteria for subhalo tidal evolution" by Barry T. Chiang & Frank C. van den Bosch (Yale U., USA) and Hsi-Yu Schive (National Taiwan University, Taiwan)
Finally for this week we have “Detectability of dark matter subhalo impacts in Milky Way stellar streams” by Junyang Lu , Tongyan Lin & Mukul Sholapurkar (UCSD, USA) and Ana Bonaca (Carnegie Observatories, USA). This was published on Friday 16th January (i.e. yesterday) in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The study develops a method to estimate the minimum detectable dark matter subhalo mass in stellar streams, ranking them by sensitivity and identifying promising lines for further research.
The overlay is here:
The officially accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Detectability of dark matter subhalo impacts in Milky Way stellar streams" by Junyang Lu , Tongyan Lin & Mukul Sholapurkar (UCSD, USA) and Ana Bonaca (Carnegie Observatories, USA)
Welcome to the first proper update for 2026 from the Open Journal of Astrophysics. The New Year brings us to Volume 9. In many countries, especially in Europe, Christmas is celebrated on January 6th so this week was also affected by the holiday season. Nevertheless, since the last update we have published four papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 4 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 452.
The first paper this week (and of course the first of 2026) is “A targeted, parallax-based search for Planet Nine” by Hector Socas-Navarro and Ignacio Trujillo (both of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canaria, Spain). This article describes a targeted search for the hypothesized Planet Nine in the outer solar system, using parallax position shifts. No credible candidates were found within the observed field. It was published on Tuesday January 6th in the folder Earth and Planetary Astrophysics. The overlay is here:
You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "A targeted, parallax-based search for Planet Nine" by Hector Socas-Navarro and Ignacio Trujillo (Instituto de Astrofísica de Canaria, Spain)
The second paper is “Going beyond S8: fast inference of the matter power spectrum from weak-lensing surveys” by Cyrille Doux (Université Grenoble Alpes, France) and Tanvi Karwal (U. Chicago, USA). This was published on Wednesday January 7th in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics and it presents a new framework to extract the scale-dependent matter power spectrum from cosmic shear and CMB lensing measurements, revealing a consistent suppression in the matter power spectrum in galaxy-lensing. The overlay is here:
The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Going beyond $S_{8}$: fast inference of the matter power spectrum from weak-lensing surveys" by Cyrille Doux (Université Grenoble Alpes, France) and Tanvi Karwal (U. Chicago, USA)
Next we have “Constraining the Stellar-to-Halo Mass Relation with Galaxy Clustering and Weak Lensing from DES Year 3 Data” which is led by G. Zacharegkas et al. (Argonne National Laboratory, USA) and has 102 other authors too numerous to list by name from many institutions around the world again too numerous to list by name. It presents a framework to analyze the relationship between a galaxy’s stellar mass and its dark matter halo mass, using data from the Dark Energy Survey. The findings align with previous results. This paper was published on Thursday January 8th in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The overlay is here:
The official version can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement is here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Constraining the Stellar-to-Halo Mass Relation with Galaxy Clustering and Weak Lensing from DES Year 3 Data" by G. Zacharegkas et al. (Argonne National Laboratory, USA) and 102 others based in numerous countries.
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Distance measurements from the internal dynamics of globular clusters: Application to the Sombrero galaxy (M 104)" by Katja Fahrion (University of Vienna, Austria) and 9 others based in Spain, Australia, UK, USA, Brazil, Germany and Switzerland.
Christmas is coming, but it’s still time for the usual update of the week’s new papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published two more regular papers, described below, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 197, as well as the 12 papers in yesterday’s Supplement, and the total published for the year up to 209, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 444.
Please note that we will be pausing publishing activity from 24th December 2025 until Monday 5th January 2026. Submissions will remain open, but no more papers will be published in Volume 8 (2025) after Christmas Eve. We will resume in the New Year with Volume 9.
The first regular paper this week is “Optimal intrinsic alignment estimators in the presence of redshift-space distortions” by Claire Lamman (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA, USA), Jonathan Blazek (Ohio State U., USA) and Daniel J. Eisenstein (Northeastern U., USA). This was published on Monday December 15th 2025 in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. The authors present estimators for quantifying intrinsic alignments in large spectroscopic surveys intended to inprove the constraints they provide for weak gravitational lensing and other cosmological applications.
The overlay is here:
You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and this is the announcement on Mastodon (Fediscience):
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Optimal intrinsic alignment estimators in the presence of redshift-space distortions" by Claire Lamman (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA), Jonathan Blazek (Ohio State U.) and Daniel J. Eisenstein (Northeastern U.); all based in the USA
The second regular paper of the week is “What is the contribution of gravitational infall on the mass assembly of star-forming clouds? A case study in a numerical simulation of the interstellar medium” by Noé Brucy (Universite Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France), Enrique Vázquez-Semadeni (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico), Tine Colman (Universite Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France), Jérémy Fensch (Universite Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France) and Ralf S. Klessen (Universität Heidelberg, Germany). This was published in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies on Friday 19th December 2025. This paper describes research using numerical simulations to quantify how much of the mass inflow into a star-forming cloud is driven by the self-gravity of the gas and the gravity from the stellar disk.
The overlay is here:
You can find the official version of this one on arXiv here. The federated announcement on Mastodon is here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "What is the contribution of gravitational infall on the mass assembly of star-forming clouds? A case study in a numerical simulation of the interstellar medium" by Noé Brucy (Universite Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France), Enrique Vázquez-Semadeni (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico), Tine Colman (Lyon), Jérémy Fensch (Lyon) and Ralf S. Klessen (Universität Heidelberg, Germany)
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In the Dark 