Archive for X-ray astronomy

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 01/11/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on November 1, 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 (although a bit later in the day than usual). Since the last update we have published another two papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 163, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 398.

The first paper this week is “Instability and vertical eccentricity variation in global hydrodynamic disk simulations” by Janosz W Dewberry (U. Mass. Amherst, USA), Henrik N. Latter and Gordon I. Ogilvie (U. Cambridge, UK) and Sebastien Fromang (U. Paris Saclay, France). This article was published in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics on Tuesday 28th October 2025; it discusses the instabilities and eccentricity variations generated in numerical hydrodynamic simulations of accretion disks.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

The Fediverse announcement is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Instability and vertical eccentricity variation in global hydrodynamic disk simulations" by Janosz W Dewberry (U. Mass. Amherst, USA), Henrik N Latter and Gordon I Ogilvie (U. Cambridge, UK) & Sebastien Fromang (U. Paris Saclay, France)

doi.org/10.33232/001c.146332

October 28, 2025, 9:43 am 2 boosts 0 favorites

The second (and last) paper of the week is “Fast X-ray Transient Detection with AXIS: application to Magnetar Giant Flares” by Michela Negro (Louisiana State University, USA) and 8 others based in the USA and Canada. This one was also published on Tuesday 28th October, but in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. It presents a feasibility study of detecting Magnetar Giant Flares with the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite (AXIS). The overlay is here:

You can find the official version of this one on arXiv here. The announcement on Mastodon is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Fast X-ray Transient Detection with AXIS: application to Magnetar Giant Flares" by Michela Negro (Louisiana State University, USA) and 8 others based in the USA and Canada

doi.org/10.33232/001c.146360

October 28, 2025, 10:02 am 1 boosts 1 favorites

It being a relatively slow week we didn’t reach the 400 mark as I thought we might, but we will probably get there next week. After 10 months of the year 2025, in which we have published 163 papers, a rough projection for the 2025 total is 195. We do have some extra papers up our sleeve, however, so we might well reach 200 for the year. We will find out soon enough!

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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 Society, The 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…

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Happy Birthday XMM Newton!

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , on December 10, 2014 by telescoper

I just discovered this morning that it’s fifteen years to the day since the launch of the orbiting X-ray Observatory XMM Newton. Here’s a nice slide-show with audio accompaniment featuring Drs Darren Baskill and Kathy Romer, both colleagues of mine in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Sussex, which was recorded for the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the launch of XMM-Newton, back on 10th December 2009.

Here’s a nice video about the science of XMM-Newton.

Anyway, I hope the birthday celebrations go well. I know I can barely contain my excitement…

xmm_phallic

XMM-Newton being prepared for launch…

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Bad News for Astrophysics from ESA

Posted in Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , on April 18, 2012 by telescoper

Just a quick post to pass on the news (which I got from Steinn Sigurdsson’s blog) that the ESA Executive (see correction in comments below) Space Science Advisory Committee (SSAC) of the European Space Agency (ESA) has made a recommendation as to the next large mission to be flown. The short list consisted of a mission to Jupiter’s moons (JUICE), an X-ray observatory (ATHENA), and a gravitational wave observatory (NGO). The last two of these are severely de-scoped versions of missions (IXO and LISA respectively) that had to be re-designed in the aftermath of decisions made in the US decadal review not to get involved in them.

Not unexpectedly, the winner is JUICE. Barring a rejection of this recommendation by the ESA Science Programme Committee (SPC) this will be the next big thing for ESA space science.

The School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University has a considerable involvement in gravitational wave physics, so the decision is disappointing for us but not entirely surprising. It’s not such a big blow either, as we are mainly involved in ground-based searches such as LIGO.

The biggest local worry will be for the sizeable community of X-ray astronomers in the UK. With no big new facilities likely for well over a decade one wonders how the expertise in this area can be sustained into the future, even if LOFT is selected as one of the next medium-sized missions. Or, given that STFC funding is already spread extremely thin, perhaps this is time for the UK to organize a strategic withdrawal from X-ray astronomy?

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