#astrophysics-of-galaxies — Public Fediverse posts

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics 24/10/2026

It’s time for another Saturday 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 249 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 697.

I continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also contain a clickable form of the DOI for each paper. Our Mastodon account has regular updates and other announcements from OJAp too, including posts from the OJAp blog.

The first paper this week was published on Tuesday 20th October in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The title is “The Metallicity Distribution of the Ultra-Faint Dwarf Galaxy Segue 1” by Daisy Bissonette (U. Chicago, USA) and 8 others based in the USA, Australia and Canada. The article explains that new data on the metallicity of ultra-faint dwarf galaxy Segue 1 reveal a continuous, short-duration episode of star formation and chemical enrichment, confirming its classification as a galaxy.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117471842140153057

The second paper for this week, also published on Tuesday 20th October in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, “Ultraviolet diversity of Little Red Dots as a probe for direct-collapse black hole ages” by Elia Cenci & Melanie Habouzit (U. Geneva, Switzerland) and Dale D. Kocevski (Colby College, USA). This article uses simulations to explore UV emissions from galaxies hosting direct-collapse black holes (DCBHs), finding that these emissions evolve rapidly, reflecting changes in stellar mass and metal enrichment.

The overlay looks like this:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117471883041096249

The third paper of the week, published on Wednesday October 21st 20206, is “Dark Energy Survey Year 6 Results: improved mitigation of spatially varying observational systematics with masking for the MagLim++ lens sample” by M. Rodríguez-Monroy (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain) and 65 others from around the world. This paper, which is in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, presents a unified definition of the DES (Dark Energy Survey) Y6 JOINT footprint in photometric surveys, improving the modelling of systematics and contamination correction, and optimising the balance between statistical power and systematic control.

The overlay for this is here:

The accepted version of this one can be found on the arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117477793081715371

The fourth and last article of the week, published on Thursday 22nd October in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics is “Spectroscopic Binary Detection as Agent-Callable Tools: Detecting 40,000+ Main-Sequence Binary Candidates from SDSS DR19 APOGEE Spectra” by Serat Mahmud Saad and Yuan-Sen Ting (Ohio State University, USA). The study repackages a method for detecting unresolved binaries in spectroscopic surveys, significantly increasing the number of identified candidates. The tools, skill, and catalog are made publicly available.

The overlay is here:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117483686175429207

That concludes this week’s update. I had anticipate that we’ll pass the 250 mark this week, but business has been slower than of late so we’ll have to wait until next week for that. It is noticeable that the arXiv submission process is slower now than it used to be, presumably because of the huge influx of AI slop that the moderators have to deal with.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics 17/10/2026

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 eight papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 245 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 693. There was no arXiv update on Monday 12th October owing to a US holiday, and I was on strike on Wednesday 14th October, so there were no papers published on either 13th or 14th October.

I continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also contain a clickable form of the DOI for each paper. Our Mastodon account has regular updates and other announcements from OJAp too, including posts from the OJAp blog.

The first new paper this week was published on Monday 12th October in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. The title is “Search for Gamma-ray emission from Abell 119 galaxy cluster using INTEGRAL/ISGRI, COMPTEL, and DAMPE data” by Siddhant Manna & Shantanu Desai (IIT Hyderabad Kandi, India. The study conducted a thorough search for non-thermal high-energy gamma-ray emission from the Abell 119 galaxy cluster using archival observations, but found no significant emission.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117426708372504596

The second paper for this week, also published on Monday 12th October, is “Fast Astronomical Transients in Archival Photographic Plates: Using optical aberrations as a tool for discerning real images, from plate artifacts” by Ivo Busko (Independent Researcher). This study supports the idea that fast astronomical transients detected in 1950s Palomar sky surveys are not just plate artifacts, but potentially genuine off-axis point sources. It is in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics.

The overlay looks like this:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117426761469024797

The third paper of the week, published on Thursday 15th October in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics, is “Differentiable Optics with dLux II: Optical Design Maximising Fisher Information” by Louis Desdoigts (Leiden Obs., NL), Benjamin Pope (Macquarie U., AU), Michael Gully-Santiago (U. Texas Austin, USA) & Peter Tuthill (U. Sydney, Australia).

The overlay for this is here:

The accepted version of this one can be found on the arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117443565520370980

The fourth new article of the week, also published on Thursday 15th October, in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies is “The Lumina Project: Intergalactic Clumping and Recombination Sinks” by Ali Sadain (U. Texas Dallas, USA) and 12 others based in the USA, S. Korea and Germany. The study uses simulations to examine the uneven recombination rates during the Epoch of Reionization, finding a universal clumping evolution and discrepancies in recombination rates due to photoheating.

The overlay is here:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117443648979460175

Paper Number Five for the week is “Blast.jl: Differentiable Non-Limber Power Spectra for Joint Clustering, Shear, and CMB lensing Analyses” by Sofia Chiarenza (U. Waterloo, Canada) and 6 others based in Canada, Italy, France and USA. This study, which is in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, presents an enhanced version of Blast.jl, a toolkit for computing non-Limber angular power spectra, incorporating various cosmological effects. Despite increased complexity, it maintains efficiency and supports gradient-based inference. It was also published on Thursday 15th October.

The overlay is here:

The officially-accepted version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117443713467579735

Sixth one up is “EMU detection of mysterious multiple component radio-continuum emission from nearby spiral Seyfert I type galaxy ‘Sand-timer’ (NGC 7213)” by Miroslav Filipović (Western Sydney U., Australia) and an international cast of 26 others. The observations presented in this paper reveal peculiar emissions and previously undetected features in the ‘Sand-timer’ galaxy NGC 7213, possibly due to black hole activity or a tidal disruption event.

The overlay is here:

The officially-accepted version of this paper is on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement on the fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117443713467579735

The seventh paper of the week is “pynucastro 3: A community library for nuclear astrophysics” by Zhi Chen (Stony Brook U., USA) and 10 others, all based in the USA. This was published on Friday 16th October, i.e. yesterday, in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. This article announces the latest release of pynucastro, a python library for nuclear astrophysics, includes new rate approximations, a stellar equation of state, StarLib support, and network exploration tools.

The overlay is here:

The officially accepted version is on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117444752698463999

The eighth, and last, of the new papers for this week is “A Deep Look at the Ultra-Faint Milky Way Satellite Virgo III with Rubin Observatory Data Preview 2” by Aashay Pai (U. Chicago, USA) and 12 others based in the USA. This study uses data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory to analyze the ultra-faint Milky Way satellite, Virgo III, confirming Virgo III’s properties as an ultra-faint dwarf galaxy.

The overlay is here:

The final version of this paper is on the arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117449310339264054

That concludes this week’s update. I anticipate that we’ll pass the 250 mark for 2026 next week, which means we’re well on target to publish over 300 papers and reach the 750 mark by the end of the year. I’ll do another update next weekend.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics 10/10/2026

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 eight papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 237 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 685.

I continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also contain a clickable form of the DOI for each paper. Our Mastodon account has regular updates and other announcements from OJAp too, including posts from the OJAp blog.

The first new paper this week was published on Monday 5th October in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. The title of the paper is “Diameters and Temperatures VII: High-angular resolution measurements of Solar-type stars with the CHARA Array” and it isby Tabetha Boyajian (Louisiana State University, USA) and 10 others based in the USA and Australia. This study uses interferometric measurements to determine precise characteristics of 27 nearby solar-type stars, including their radii, effective temperatures, and luminosities. The findings represent benchmarks for testing stellar evolutionary theory.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117387213836435395

The second paper for this week, published on Tuesday 6th October, is “The jet-shaped pipe morphology in planetary nebulae and core-collapse supernova remnants” by Jessica Braudo and Noam Soker (Technion, Israel). This article, published in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, he study suggests that jets shape the ‘pipe’ structures in core-collapse supernova remnants and jet-shaped planetary nebulae, based on comparisons with hydrodynamical numerical simulations.

The overlay looks like this:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117392678606207435

The third paper of the week, “Balancing bias, baryons, and scale cuts in LSST 3x2pt analysis” is by Ottavia Truttero (U. Edinburgh, UK) and 5 others on behalf of the The LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration. It was published on Tuesday 6th October in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics and presents a new analysis for LSST Y1 and Y10 data, exploring the effects of galaxy bias and baryonic feedback. The article also introduces a new open-source pipeline, MGL.

The overlay for this is here:

The accepted version of this one can be found on the arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117392776835315772

The fourth new paper of the week, published on Wednesday 7th Octonber, in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics, is “High-Precision Differential Radial Velocities of C3PO Wide Binaries: A Test of Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND)” by Serat M. Saad and Yuan-Sen Ting (Ohio State University, USA). The paper describes a technique to measure differential radial velocities of wide-binary stars, improving precision and enabling better analysis of Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), suggesting tension with current estimates of the acceleration scale.

The overlay is here:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117398493738710737

Paper Number Five for the week is “Simulating the jittering-jets explosion mechanism: circum-jet rings account for observed core-collapse supernova remnant morphologies” by Muhammad Akashi & Noam Soker (Technion, Israel). The study uses 3D simulations to explore core-collapse supernova explosions driven by jets, supporting the jittering jets explosion mechanism theory. The simulations explain observed circum-jet rings in supernova remnants. This was also published on Wednesday 7th October, but in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena.

The overlay is here:

The officially-accepted version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117398573868529566

The sixth paper of the week is “Radio Continuum Study of One of the Brightest Large Magellanic Cloud Supernova Remnant N 132D” by Rami Z. E. Alsaberi (Western Sydney U. Australia) and 7 others. This was the first of three papers published on Friday 9th October, and it is in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. This one presents a radio continuum analysis of the Large Magellanic Cloud supernova remnant N 132D, revealing insights into its magnetic field structure, energetic properties, and particle acceleration.

The officially-accepted version of this paper is on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement on the fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117409740216472768

The seventh paper of the week is “New Signs Pointing Toward a Correlation Between Astrophysical Neutrinos and Radio Flares” by Yjan Gordon (U. Wisconsin-Madison), Peter S. Ferguson (U. Washington), Eric J. Hooper & Michael N. Martinez (U. Wisconsin-Madison); all in the USA. This was also published on Friday 7th October, but in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It is very topical, in the light of the award of this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics to Francis Halzen for his work on IceCube. The paper explains how data from VLASS and IceCube Neutrino Observatory reveal a correlation between radio variability and astrophysical neutrino detection, suggesting radio flares contribute to about 13% of astrophysical neutrinos detected by IceCube.

The overlay is here:

The officially accepted version is on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117409801852226309

The eighth, and last, of the new papers for this week is “Spectroscopic follow-up of compact object binary candidates from Gaia DR3: White dwarfs, neutron stars, black holes, and the parallax zeropoint” by Kareem El-Badry (Caltech, USA) and an international cast of 14 others. This paper uses data from Gaia DR3 to analyze orbits of binary systems, including potential black holes, neutron stars, and white dwarfs. It was published on Friday 9th October, i.e. yesterday, in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics.

The overlay is here:

The final version of this paper is on the arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117409906391375973

That concludes this week’s update. We’re still on target to publish over 300 papers and reach the 750 mark by the end of the year. I’ll do another update next week.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics 03/10/2026

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 13 papers, including one correction to an article already published, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 229 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 677. This would have been a busy week even without the clutch of four MEGATRON papers announced on Wednesday!

I continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also contain a clickable form of the DOI for each paper. Our Mastodon account has regular updates and other announcements from OJAp too, including posts from the OJAp blog.

The first new paper this week was published on Tuesday 28th September in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. The title is “Phlegethon: a fully compressible magnetohydrodynamic code for simulations in stellar astrophysics” and it is by G. Leidi (Heidelberger Institut für Theoretische Studie, Germany) and 14 others. PHLEGETHON is a magnetohydrodynamic code designed for multidimensional simulations in stellar astrophysics, capable of modeling a wide range of dynamical processes in stars. It is publicly accessible online.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117353123029298309

The second paper for this week, published on Tuesday 29th September, is “The impact of source and survey modelling on the connection between [O III] emitters and Ly-α forest transmission at z ~ 6” by Luke Conaboy (U. Nottingham, UK) and 5 others based in the UK, India and Germany. This study improves theoretical work on the connection between galaxies and the intergalactic medium, using an empirical model and James Webb Space Telescope surveys. It is in the folder marked Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics.

The overlay looks like this:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117353186706460890

Next we have four related papers produced by the MEGATRON Project, led by Harley Katz (U. Chicago) and Martin Rey (U. Bath, UK), Corentin Cadiou (IAP Paris, France). These were all published on Wednesday 30th September in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies.

I mentioned this in a separate blog post here, so I won’t describe them in detail again here. Here are the four overlays:

The Mastodon announcement for these is in the form of a thread:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117360208450162112

The four papers can be found on arXiv here, here, here and here.

The four MEGATRON papers were not the only ones published on Wednesday 30th September, however. We published “The Chirp-Mass Ladder: A New Rung Emerges” by Vaibhav Tiwari (U. Birmingham, UK) in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena on that day too. This paper presents an analysis of 256 binary black-hole (BBH) events, suggesting a hierarchical merger scenario to explain the structured mass distribution, and encouraging further investigation into hierarchical mergers’ role in the BBH population. The overlay for this is here:

The accepted version of this one can be found on the arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117360976282043649

The eighth new paper of the week, published on Thursday 1st October 2026, in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, is “A Consistent Implementation of Cluster Strong Lensing in Cosmological Simulation Light Cones” by Cian Roche (MIT, USA) and 11 others based in the USA, Germany and Italy.

The overlay is here:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117313452009130829

We now have four papers all published on Friday 2nd October (i.e. yesterday).

The first of this batch is “Analytical weak-lensing shear response of galaxy model fitting” by Xiangchong Li (Brookhaven National Laboratory, USA). This is in the folder marked Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics: it explores how galaxy model fitting responds to weak-lensing shear distortions using a new algebraic system, quintuple numbers, within the AnaCal framework, keeping multiplicative bias low.

The overlay is here:

The officially-accepted version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117369829010377996

The 10th paper of the week is “Evidence for inefficient dust production in a massive, metal-rich galaxy at z=7.13 uncovered by JWST and ALMA” by Kasper E. Heintz (Cosmic Dawn Center, Copenhagen, Denmark) and 19 others in Europe, UK and USA. This article, published on Friday 2nd October 2026, in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, analyzes cosmic dust in high redshift galaxies, specifically A1689-zD1, using data from JWST and ALMA, suggesting dust formation and destruction processes differ for galaxies in the early Universe.

The officially-accepted version of this paper is on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement on the fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117369922539182969

The 11th paper of the week is “Starbursts hiding in the main sequence: a pathway toward quenching?” by Florent Renaud (Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg, France) and 12 others based in France and UK. This article explores the “starbursts in the main sequence” (SBMSs) that intermittently appear in galaxy evolution, attributing their existence to earlier stellar mass assembly and frequent mergers. It was published on Friday 2nd October 2026, in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies.

The overlay is here:

The officially accepted version is on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117369978824690794

The twelfth, and last, of the new papers for this week is “Ring Position Angles and Spin in M87* and Sgr A*” by Nicholas S. Conroy (U. Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA) and 6 others all based in the USA. This was also published on Friday 2nd October but in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena.

The overlay is here:

The final version of this paper is on the arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117370029522771607

And finally, on Monday 28th September we announced one (minor) correction to a previously published article. The overlay of the correction notice is here:

The mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117347566188359426

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

That concludes this week’s update. As things are going we seem likely to publish over 300 papers this year, and may reach the 750 mark by the end of the year too. I’ll do another update next week.

A MEGATRON Day!

Today we published four papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics all related to the Megatron Project which is co-led by Martin Rey of the University of Bath (UK), Harley Katz of the University of Chicago (USA) and Corentin Cadiou of the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris in France. I will include this quartet in my regular weekly update on Saturday but there is a press release accompanying these publications so I thought I’d splash them a bit here too.

I’ll show the overlays on Saturday but in the meantime here are some pretty graphics from three of the papers:

In no particular order the four papers are:

MEGATRON: Reproducing the Diversity of High-Redshift Galaxy Spectra with Cosmological Radiation Hydrodynamics Simulations

MEGATRON: how the first stars can create an iron metallicity plateau in the smallest dwarf galaxies

MEGATRON: the impact of non-equilibrium effects and local radiation fields on the circumgalactic medium at cosmic noon”

MEGATRON: The Physical Origins of Steep UV Slopes at high redshift

The Press Release from the University of Bath is reproduced below. A Press Release in French can be found here.

–o–

New simulations connect the first stars to cosmic fingerprints still visible today

International MEGATRON project links space telescope observations of the infant Universe with the chemical fossil record of the Milky Way.

Researchers have used some of the most detailed simulations yet of the early Universe to investigate how the first stars and galaxies formed.

Led by researchers at the University of Bath, alongside collaborators at the University of Chicago in the US and the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris in France, the MEGATRON project uses advanced simulations to explore how the first stars and galaxies lit up the previously dark cosmos and enriched it with the chemical elements that would later become the building blocks of everything around us.

Published today in the Open Journal of Astrophysics, four studies from the MEGATRON project combine cutting-edge cosmological simulations with sophisticated models of radiation, chemistry and galaxy formation. Together, these constitute the collaboration’s first substantial body of published results, with further papers expected to follow.

The findings from the study of the first stars show that accurately capturing the interplay between starlight, gas and newly forged elements is essential for connecting two previously separate views of the early Universe: observations of young galaxies by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the chemical clues preserved in ancient stars in and around the Milky Way – the galaxy that contains our Solar System.

JWST provides a direct view of galaxies in the infant Universe, while ancient stars act as a fossil record of cosmic history. By studying the chemical fingerprints of these ancient stars, astronomers can reconstruct the properties of the first stars and trace how they enriched the cosmos with the first chemical elements.

The simulations follow the evolution of a young galaxy that will eventually grow into a system similar in mass to the Milky Way. Using advanced computer models that simultaneously track the movement of gas, the propagation of starlight and the evolution of chemical concentrations, the team investigated how stars shape the gas in and around galaxies over billions of years.

The study suggests that simplified models may underestimate the influence of stellar radiation and complex chemical processes on the gas surrounding galaxies. By modelling these effects at exceptionally high resolution, the team resolved structures in the gas that are not captured by simpler models, helping to improve predictions for current and future astronomical observations.

A direct glimpse of the infant cosmos

Dr Martin Rey from the Department of Physics at the University of Bath and a lead contributor to the MEGATRON collaboration, said: “The James Webb Space Telescope gives us a direct glimpse of the infant cosmos, while stellar archaeology allows us to study the relics of those earliest times in our own Galactic neighbourhood. MEGATRON provides a physical bridge between the two.”

The simulations begin with pristine gas containing no heavy elements, mirroring conditions shortly after the Big Bang. They then follow the birth of the first stars, the radiation they emit, the supernova explosions that mark their deaths and the dispersal of newly forged elements into subsequent generations of stars and galaxies.

Understanding this process is central to one of astronomy’s most fundamental questions: where the elements that make up today’s Universe came from.

Dr Rey said: “The elements that make our world and life possible – carbon, oxygen, iron and many others – were forged by stars. To understand where those elements came from, we need to understand how the first stars formed and enriched their surroundings. MEGATRON allows us to test these ideas directly by comparing detailed simulations with observations from JWST and the chemical fingerprints preserved in ancient stars.”

Looking ahead, the team plans to use MEGATRON to strengthen links between theory and emerging observational data. As JWST continues to transform our understanding of the earliest galaxies, large-scale stellar surveys will provide increasingly detailed information about ancient stars in and around the Milky Way.

Dr Rey and his colleagues at Bath are already developing the next generation of simulations. The project has been awarded 40 million processor hours on the UK’s national supercomputers, equivalent to running five million laptops in parallel for a year. These resources will enable simulations with higher resolution and more complete physical models, allowing even more direct comparisons with JWST observations and the chemical fossil record preserved in ancient stars.

“MEGATRON provides a common physical framework for interpreting two of astronomy’s most exciting new datasets: JWST’s view of the earliest galaxies and the stellar fossil record,” said Dr Rey. “Together, these complementary observations allow us to test competing models of the first stars in ways that weren’t previously possible.”

The MEGATRON project started in 2023 and is scheduled to run until 2030.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics 26/09/2026

It’s time once more for another Saturday update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further eight papers, including one correction to an article already published, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 217 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 664. This is the third week running that we have published 7 new papers.

I continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also contain a clickable form of the DOI for each paper. Our Mastodon account has regular updates and other announcements from OJAp too, including posts from the OJAp blog.

The first paper this week was published on Monday 21st September in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. The title is “The Payne Zero Project I: Stellar Spectra from Physical Models in Seconds” and it is by Yuan-Sen Ting (Ohio State U., USA) and Elliot M. Kim (Cornell U., USA). The study introduces Payne Zero, a tool that reorganizes stellar spectra calculations for GPU-native synthesis, significantly speeding up the process and enabling direct physical fitting and atomic-data calibration at survey scale.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117307742128594169

The second paper for this week, published on Tuesday 22nd September, is titled “RUBIES: The Evolution of the Ionization Parameter from 0 < z < 9” and is in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The authors are Nikko Cleri (Penn State U., USA) and 12 others based in the USA, Switzerland and Germany. The article involves an examination of the time evolution of the ionization parameter in galaxies, finding that it increases with redshift and specific star formation rate, and decreases with stellar mass.

The overlay looks like this:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117313404206103454

The third paper of the week, also published on Tuesday 22nd September 2026 and in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “Kinematics of the Weak Cool-Core Cluster A3571 Observed with XRISM: Low Cooling Rate Balanced by Low Heating Rate?” by Hannah McCall (U. Chicago, USA) and 12 others based all around the world. This study examines gas kinematics in the relaxed, AGN-feedback-free galaxy cluster A3571 using XRISM observations. Findings suggest sloshing motions may significantly contribute to the heating budget.

The overlay is here:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117313452009130829

The fourth paper of the week, the first of three published on Wednesday 23rd September, is “The Simons Observatory: Development of a Pipeline to Detect Rapid Transients in Time-Ordered Data” by Justin Clancy (U. Melbourne, Australia) and 16 others from around the world. The study introduces a method for detecting fast, dynamic astrophysical transients using cosmic microwave background survey telescopes, demonstrating its effectiveness in the Simons Observatory time-domain pipeline. It is in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics.

The overlay is here:

The officially-accepted version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117319061315704715

The fifth paper of the week is “Fisher Forecasting for the DESC with Augur” by Paul Rogozenski (Carnegie Mellon U., USA) and 16 others on behalf of the The LSST Dark Energy Science CollaborationThis was also published on Wednesday 16th September, but in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. This paper introduces the Augur tool, designed to provide Fisher forecasts for cosmological inference for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).

The overlay for this one looks like this:

The officially-accepted version of this paper is on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement on the fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117319128929248257

The sixth paper of the week is “Profile Analysis of the Multiwavelength 2.1-year Oscillations of PG 1553+113” by Pablo Penil (Clemson U. USA) and 7 others based in the USA, Germany and Spain. This was also published on Wednesday 23rd September, in the Astrophysics of Galaxies. The study examines the oscillation profiles of blazar PG~1553+113, finding that its 2.1-year periodicity is not strictly sinusoidal and varies across energy bands.

The overlay is here:

The officially accepted version is on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117319203193498190

Our seventh, and last, new paper of the week is “Radial Pulsations in Polaris: A Secondary Science Application of Cherenkov Telescopes via Intensity Interferometry” by Km Nitu Rai (IISER, India), Prasenjit Saha (U. Zurich, Switzerland) and Subrata Sarangi (IUCAA, India). This study demonstrates how Cherenkov telescopes, typically unused during moonlit nights, can be used for advanced optical stellar measurements, particularly for characterizing bright stars such as Polaris.

The overlay is here:

The final version of this paper is on the arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117330682487600066

And finally we have one (minor) correction to a previously published article. The overlay of the correction notice is here:

The mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117325179171291279

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

That concludes this week’s update. I’ll just add a mention of yesterday’s post announcing that the Open Journal of Astrophysics is a Q1 Journal. It will be interesting to see if that stimulates another increase in submissions. As things are going we seem likely to publish about 300 papers this year. I’ll also mention that an exciting development is in the pipeline for next week, but I can’t say more until it happens.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics 19/09/2026

It’s time once more for another Saturday 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 209 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 656. This is the second week running that we have published 7 papers.

I continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also contain a clickable form of the DOI for each paper. Our Mastodon account has regular updates and other announcements from OJAp too.

The first paper this week was published on Monday 14th September in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. The title is “The Power of DESI for Photometric Redshift Calibration: A Case Study with KiDS-1000” and it is by Diana Blanco (UC Santa Cruz, USA) and 66 others distributed internationally. This study explores using the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) to calibrate photometric redshift distributions for gravitational lensing, which could improve understanding of dark energy and cosmic structure. In fact this paper was ready for publication a few months ago, but the first author left for another job before putting the final version on arXiv so it took a while to finish it.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117268628916508150

The second paper for this week, published on Tuesday 15th September in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics, is “Exploration of groups and outliers in Gaia RVS stellar spectra with metric learning” by Yarden Eilat Bloch & Dovi Poznanski (Tel-Aviv U., Israel), Nick L. J. Cox & Emmanuel Bernhard (ACRI-ST, Grasse, France), Iain McDonald (U. Manchester, UK), Manuela Rauch (Know Center, GmbH, Graz, Austria), and Albert Zijlstra (Manchester). This article presents a new dataset and interactive portal that applies advanced techniques to analyze and visualize nearly a million spectra from the Gaia mission, potentially revealing undiscovered stellar phenomena.

The overlay looks like this:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117274148852515086

The third paper of the week, published on Wednesday 16th September in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics is “XID+PRIMA, II: Stepping Through Hyperspectral Imaging to Deblend PRIMAger Beyond the Extragalactic Confusion Limit” by James M. S. Donnellan (U. Sussex, UK) and 12 others based in the UK, France, USA, and The Netherlands. This article explains how PRobe far-Infrared Mission for Astrophysics (PRIMA) uses a new Bayesian modelling approach to map large areas with unprecedented sensitivity. Overcoming confusion noise limitations, enables robust detection of IR-luminous galaxies

The overlay is here:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117279546283253079

The fourth paper of the week, also published on Wednesday 16th September but in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies is “The Curious Case of Centaurus A: On the Subject of the Quenched satellites” by Sachi Weerasooriya (Carnegie Obs., USA) and 8 others based in the USA and Canada. This study investigates the lack of luminous satellite galaxies in Centaurus A’s inner regions, suggesting that AGN-driven thermal feedback could suppress star formation, affecting the survival and evolution of satellites

The overlay is here:

The officially-accepted version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117279612049669705

The fifth paper of the week is “A Unified Halo Mass Function Across Dark Matter Models from High-Resolution Multi-Scale Simulations” by Andrew Benson (Carnegie Institute for Science), Ethan O. Nadler (UC San Diego), and Xiaolong Du & Vera Gluscevic (UCLA) – all based in the USA. This was also published on Wednesday 16th September, but in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics.

The overlay for this one looks like this:

The officially-accepted version of this paper is on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement on the fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117279676509847324

The penultimate, sixth, paper of the week is “Weak-lensing Shear-Selected Galaxy Clusters from the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program: III. A precision cosmological sample enabled by optical confirmation” by I-Non Chiu (National Cheng Kung U., Taiwan) and 11 others from around the world. This was published on Thursday 17th September in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. The overlay is here:

The officially accepted version is on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117285572444412649

Last, but by no means least, we have our seventh paper of the week: “The Cosmological Simulation Code OpenGadget3 – Implementation of Self-Interacting Dark Matter” by Moritz S. Fischer (Donastia International Physics Center, Spain) and 9 others based in Germany, Italy, USA , Sweden and Denmark. This was published on Friday 18th September (i.e. yesterday) in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. This paper discusses the use of OpenGadget3, a tool for simulating self-interacting dark matter (SIDM), and highlights its capabilities, performance, and areas for improvement.

The overlay is here:

The final version of this paper is on the arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117291507209099359

That concludes this week’s update. At the rate we’re going we could well reach 300 by the end of the year, but we’ll just have to wait and see about that. I’ll do another next weekend.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics 12/09/2026

It’s time once more for another Saturday 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 202 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 649. This means that the total in Vol. 9 (2026) has now passed that of Vol. 8 (2025), with more than three months to go.

I continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also contain a clickable form of the DOI for each paper. Our Mastodon account has regular updates and other announcements from OJAp too.

The first paper this week was published on Monday 7th September in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The title is “Not all cores are equal: Phase-space origins of dynamical friction, stalling and buoyancy” and the authors are Shashank Dattathri & Frank C. van den Bosch (Yale U., USA), Uddipan Banik (Princeton U., USA), Martin Weinberg (U. Mass., USA), Priyamvada Natarajan (Yale U., USA), Zhaozhou Li (Nanjing U., China) and Avishai Dekel (The Hebrew U., Israel). The paper describes how the distribution function of a galaxy, not just its central density gradient, influences the efficiency and direction of dynamical friction, affecting the movement of massive objects within it.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117228580379311271

The second paper for this week, also published on Monday 7th September, but in the folder Earth and Planetary Astrophysics, is “The Third Option: Color Phase Curves to Characterize the Atmospheres of Temperate Rocky Exoplanets” by Drake Deming (U. Maryland, USA) and 8 others based in the USA, Germany and The Netherlands. This article presents a A spectroscopic survey of the Carousel lens galaxy cluster, identifying 12 lensed sources and 57 unlensed field galaxies. The findings could help constrain cosmological parameters and cluster properties.

The overlay looks like this:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117228634584835048

The third paper of the week, also published on Monday 7th September but in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, is “Dependences of radio pulsar parameters on the kick velocity” by Anton D. Lazarev and Sergei B. Popov (Moscow State U., Russia). This study analyzes the velocity kick of neutron stars, finding that 23% belong to the low-velocity mode. Differences in magnetic field distribution emerge, but no significant bimodality in physical parameters.

The overlay is here:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117228716672955417

The fourth paper of the week is “A Dusty Quenching-Candidate AGN host at z=5.7: massive quiescent galaxies may quench already during the dust-obscured phase” by Francesco D’Eugenio (U. Cambridge, UK) and 14 others from the UK, Italy, China and The Netherlands. It was published on Wednesday 8th September in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. This article concerns RUBIES-EGS-9809, a dust-reddened galaxy with a dominant point-source component, suggests that AGN feedback may influence its host., indicating that massive galaxies can host evolved stellar populations during their dust-obscured phase.

The overlay is here:

The officially-accepted version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117240213971385314

The fifth paper of the week is “The Carousel Lens I: A Spectroscopic Survey of the Carousel Lens Field” by Jackson H. O’Donnell (U.C. Santa Cruz, USA) and 22 others from around the world. This was published in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies on Thursday 10th September 2026. This paper presents a spectroscopic survey of the Carousel lens galaxy cluster, identifying 12 lensed sources and 57 unlensed field galaxies. The findings could help constrain cosmological parameters and cluster properties.

The overlay for this one looks like this:

The officially-accepted version of this paper is on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement on the fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117245758277502000

The penultimate, sixth, paper of the week is “No Gravitational Anomaly in Wide Binaries from Forward Modeling of 3D Orbits” by Serat M. Saad and Yuan-Sen Ting (Ohio State U., USA). This was also published on Thursday 10th September, but in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. The study reanalyzes a dataset on gravitational anomalies, finding results consistent with Newtonian gravity, contrary to previous findings that suggested Modified Newtonian Dynamics. The overlay for this one is here:

The officially accepted version is on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117245834036376367

Last but by no means least we have “The quenching time and timescale distribution of z~2 quiescent galaxies from precise colour distribution analysis” by Vivienne Wild (U. St Andrews, UK), Ho-Hin Leung & Adam Carnal (U. Edinburgh, UK) and Maya Skarbinski (Johns Hopkins U., USA). This paper was published on Thursday 10th September in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It describes a study that uses simulation-based inference to analyze galaxy formation and quenching times, revealing that galaxies must quench rapidly post-Big Bang to achieve a specific color distribution.

The overlay is here:

The final version of this paper is on the arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117245909777322846

It is worth mentioning that there was one deferred arXiv mailing this week, due to the Labor Day holiday in the USA, so some papers were therefore published a day later than usual.

That concludes this week’s update. I’ll do another next weekend.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics 05/09/2026

After a very busy week, it’s time once more for another Saturday 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 194 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 642. As explained at the end of this post, one of the five publications is a correction of an earlier paper.

I continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also show the DOI for each paper. The Mastodon account has regular updates and other announcements from OJAp too.

The first paper this week was published on Monday 31st August 2026 in the folder Earth and Planetary Astrophysics: “Modeling Carbon-Based Planets with MAGRATHEA” by Robert L Royer (U. Nevada, USA), David R Rice (U. Wisconsin-Madison, USA) and Jason H Steffen (U. Nevada, USA). This describes a modification of the planetary interior solver MAGRATHEA to include Carbon-based mantles to enable it to understand more fully the range of possible planet structures.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117188866852724164

The second paper for this week, published on Tuesday 1st September in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena is “SCAT Data Release 1: 1812 optical spectra of 1331 transients” by Michael A Tucker (Ohio State University, USA) and 21 others from around the world. This is the first data release of the Spectroscopic Classification of Astronomical Transients survey includes 1812 spectra of 1331 transients, offering valuable insights for photometric/light curve classification pipelines.

The overlay looks like this:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117194673481928523

The third paper of the week is “The neighboring stars of N6946-BH1 and the observational characteristics of failed supernovae” by Raquel Forés-Toribio and C. S. Kochanek (Ohio State University, USA). This study, published on Wednesday 2nd September 2026 in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics, re-analyzes images of potential failed supernova N6946-BH1, finding four unrelated near-infrared neighbors. It also compares the luminosity of failed supernova remnants to stellar merger remnants, noting significant differences.

The overlay is here:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117200190176524949

The fourth paper of the week is “How similar are narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies and high-z type 1 AGN?” by Marco Berton (ESO, Chile), Emilia Järvelä (Texas Tech. U., USA), Alessia Tortosa (INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma, Italy) and Chiara Mazzucchelli (Universidad Diego Portales, Chile). This was published on Thursday 3rd September 2026 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. This paper reviews the properties of local narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies and compares them with high-redshift active galactic nuclei, aiding understanding of early black hole evolution.

The overlay is here:

The officially-accepted version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117205976156879654

That concludes the new papers for the week, but there is one additional announcement in the form of a correction to a previously published paper:

The updated paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117217704886109161

In the past when we have had minor correctionsto make we have simply asked the authors to create a new version, then when it has been checked, to place it on arXiv with a comment on the correction made. We then change the overlay to point to the new version with a comment on the change. I was recently advised, however, that best practice is to create a specific entry in Crossref for the corrected version, linked to the old one. Our Scholastica platform now has a mechanism to do this so from now on we will adopt this approach.

So ends this week’s update.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics 29/08/2026

After a very busy week, it’s time once more for another Saturday update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further twelve papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 189 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 637. As I pointed out on Wednesday this week is the first during which we have published at least one paper in each of the six categories on astro-ph.

I continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also show the DOI for each paper. The Mastodon account has regular updates and announcements from OJAp too.

In the past on these posts I have included the article keywords as tags, but this is quite a lot of effort to do for little benefit so I’ve decided just to tag the arXiv category (i.e. folder) and arXiv ID for each paper as well as the lede from the journal platform.

The first one up this week was published on Monday 24th August 2026 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. “Energy-Space Analysis of Tidal Stripping in Stellar-Dark Matter Systems“, by Bradley Arias (UC Berkeley, USA), Nicole E. Drakos (U. Hawaii, USA) and James E. Taylor (U. Waterloo, Canada), uses simulations to explore how tidal stripping shapes the stellar distribution of dwarf galaxies, also suggesting a pathway for the formation of galaxies deficient in dark matter

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117149577689452421

The second paper for this week, also published on Monday 24th August but in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics is “Second Order Closures for the Radiative Transfer Equation: Some Are Unstable” by Nickolay Y. Gnedin and Harley Katz (U.Chicago, USA). This study explores higher-order closure relations in cosmic reionization simulations, finding that direct generalizations of M1 and OTVET are physically unstable, limiting second-order closure options.

The overlay looks like this:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117149727627644345

The third paper of the week, yet another one published on Monday 24th August this time in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics is “Differentiable Forward Modeling for Efficient and Accurate Shear Inference” by Ismael Mendoza and 7 others on behalf of the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration. This study presents a modern implementation of the Bayesian shear inference framework for measuring cosmic shear signal in dark energy optical surveys, requiring no external calibration to handle noise bias.

The overlay is here:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117149787932357282

The fourth paper of the week, published on Tuesday 25th August in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics is “BLG723.31.34651 as an eclipsing Roche lobe-filling sdOB+WD binary” by Alekzander Kosakowski, Charles E. Derbyshire, Sydney Jetton and Brad N. Barlow (University of North Carolina, USA).

The overlay is here:

The officially-accepted version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117155004481814929

The fifth paper of the week is “Differentiable Halo Mass Prediction and the Cosmology-Dependence of Halo Mass Functions” by Jim Buisman, Florian List and Oliver Hahn (U. Vienna, Austria). This was published on Tuesday 25th August in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics; it presents a novel approach using a differentiable neural network model for predicting dark matter haloes abundance and their cosmology dependence, achieving competitive accuracy in identifying protohalo regions.Abstractfor Differentiable Halo Mass Prediction and the Cosmology-Dependence of Halo Mass Functions.

The overlay is here:

The officially-accepted version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117155031552676673

The sixth paper of the week is “An astrometric search for planets in debris disk systems” by Elisabeth M Penderghast & Benjamin C Bromley (U. Utah, USA), Scott J Kenyon (Smithsonian Astrophys. Obs., USA) and Joan R Najita (NSF NOIRLab, USA). This was published on Tuesday 25th August 2026 in the folder Earth and Planetary Astrophysics. This study uses Gaia astrometric data and machine learning to identify stars with debris disks that may host undiscovered planets, providing potential subjects for future analyses.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially-accepted version of the paper on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117155079544106330

Paper number seven for the week is “Precision Spectroscopy for 1.7 Million Galaxies from SDSS-IV: Improved Spectral Measurements and Catalogs for eBOSS” by Owen Matthews Acuña (U. Wisconsin Madison, USA) and 8 others based at various instititions in the USA. This was published on Tuesday 25th August in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The paper presents an extensive spectroscopic catalog and other data products for the EBOSS galaxy sample, opening the door to a new generation of studies in galaxy evolution and cosmology.

The overlay for this paper looks like this:

The officially-accepted paper can be found on arXiv here and the fediverse announcement follows

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117155161877074916

The eighth paper of the week, published on Wednesday 27th August in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena is the one that completed our full house for the week. This study presents XRISM observations of the merging cluster Abell 2034, revealing the broadest emission lines yet seen in a galaxy cluster, indicating potential turbulence and core disruption.

The overlay is here:

You can find the official version on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117162070740881057

The ninth paper of the week is “Visualizing Disequilibrium: Tracing Two-Point Correlations to Specific Spatial Structures in the Milky Way” by Austin Hinkel and Josephine Vanzant (Thomas More U. USA). This paper, published on Friday 27th August in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, presents an algorithm that enhances the Two-Point Correlation Function, enabling detailed visualization of spatial clustering and complex structures in the Milky Way.

The overlay for this one looks like this:

You can find the officially-accepted version of the paper on arXiv here and the fediverse announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117171660235818745

The tenth paper of the week is “Assessing Self-Absorbed Molecular Lines as Tracers of Gravitational Collapse” by Lillian Y. Cai (Priinceton U., USA) and Felix D. Priestley & Sarah E. Ragan (Cardiff U., UK). This paper, reveals that traditional observational techniques probably underestimate true infall velocities and mass accretion rates in collapsing prestellar cores due to non-uniform radial velocity profiles.

The overlay for this one is here:

The officially accepted version can be found on arXiv here and here is the fediverse announcement:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117171703521364607

The penultimate paper of the week, the eleventh, is “The Impact of Non-Gaussian Line Spread Functions on Stellar Kinematic Recovery: Consequences for Dynamical Models” by David A. Simon (Oxford University, UK). This article was also published on 28th August 2026 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It explores the impact of non-Gaussian line spread function (LSF) profiles on stellar kinematics recovery. A method was developed to reduce bias in dispersion, with a Python implementation available.

A screenshot of the overlay for this one is here:

The final accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the fediverse announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117171836803474101

The last paper of the twelve to announce this week is “Impact and interplay of ΛCDM analysis choices for LSST cosmic shear” by Naomi Clare Robertson and 11 others for the FLAMINGO Team and the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration. This was also published on Friday 28th August 2026, but in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. The study forecasts cosmological parameter constraints for a cosmic shear analysis of the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), emphasizing the need for improved methods. This is what the overlay looks like:

The final accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the fediverse announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117171773746280837

And that concludes the papers for this week, which turned out to be a bumper one! I’ll do another update next weekend.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics 22/08/2026

Later than usual, it’s time once more for another Saturday 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 177 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 625.

I continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also show the DOI for each paper. In the past on these posts I have included the article keywords as tags, but this is quite a lot of effort to do for little benefit so I’ve decided just to tag the arXiv category (i.e. folder) and arXiv ID for each paper.

The first one up this week was published on Tuesday 18th August in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The article “Ghostly DLAs in SDSS DR16” by Patrick Petitjean (Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, France). This study revisits the origin of proximate damped Lyman-alpha absorbers (PDLAs), associating most with the AGN or quasar host galaxy environment..

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117115214327443735

The second paper for this week, also published on Tuesday 18th August in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies is “Dust in the Average Galaxy: Attenuation, Emission, and Opacity from 0<z<7” by Caitlin M. Casey (University of California Santa Barbara, USA) and an international cast of 45 others. This study analyzes over 500,000 galaxies to understand dust emission and attenuation properties. Findings reveal UV/optical attenuation underestimates IR luminosity, and dust constraints are crucial for understanding star-forming galaxies.

The overlay looks like this:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117115391277711646

The third paper of the week, yet another one published on Tuesday 18th August Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “First Light And Reionization Epoch Simulations (FLARES) XXI: The UV Indices of Galaxies in the Early Universe” by Connor Sant Fournier (University of Malta, Malta) and 7 others based in Malta and the UK. This study uses synthetic spectral modelling and cosmological simulations to assess UV absorption line indices as reliable tracers of stellar metallicity in high-redshift galaxies.

The overlay is here:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117115462297167216

The fourth paper of the week is “White dwarf + M dwarf Detached Binaries in Long Period Radio Transients: Observed Binary Parameters, Evolution, and Population Constraints” by Antonio Rodriguez (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA, USA), Kareem El-Badry (Caltech, USA), Iris de Ruiter (U. Sydney, Australia), Kaustubh Rajwade (U. Oxford, UK), Edo Berger & Liam Connor (CfA) and Natasha Hurley-Walker (Curtin U., Australia). This was published on Wednesday 19th August in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. This article presents new findings on long period radio transients (LPTs), slow-pulsing radio sources, associated with M dwarf-white dwarf systems., suggests these systems are part of a significant Galactic population of such objects.

The overlay is here:

The officially-accepted version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117121022550941129

The fifth paper of the week is “Cosmological Dynamics of Multi-Axion Quintessence” by Supakorn Katewongveerachart (Mahidol U., Thailand) and David J. E. Marsh, King’s College London, UK). This was published on Thursday 20th August 2026 in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. This study explores dark energy dynamics, and their potential observational consequences, for a cosmological model with two, three or four axion fields.

The overlay is here:

The officially-accepted version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117126567320691855

Finally for this week, the sixth paper of the week is “How can we finally see the first light? Status and perspective in the search for Population III stars” by Alessandra Venditti (U. Texas Austin, USA) and 28 others from around the world. This was published on Thursday August 20th in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. This review article discusses the ongoing search for the first stars (Population III), their formation, and characteristics. It highlights various observational strategies and the role of advanced technology in this quest. This can perhaps act as a reminder that we do publish review articles, as long as the Editorial Board and the reviewers consider them a useful contribution to the literature.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially-accepted version of the paper on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117126631513103035

And that’s all for this week. We’re starting to clear the backlog of papers accepted through the summer but yet to be published, but it will probably take a few weeks to do so completely.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics 15/08/2026

Although it’s still holiday season for some, it’s time once more for another Saturday 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 171 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 619.

I 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 was published on Monday 10th August in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. “Search for neutrino emission from blazar γ-ray flares accounting for possible neutrino time delays” by Egor Podlesny & Foteini Oikonomou (Norwegian University of Science & Technology, Trondheim, Norway) investigates high-energy neutrino emissions associated with blazar flares, using data from IceCat-1, MOJAVE, CGRaBS, and Fermi-LAT. A slight correlation was found, consistent with the null hypothesis.

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117069981161677800

The second paper for this week, published on Tuesday 11th August in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics is “The velocity coherence scale: a novel probe of cosmic homogeneity and a potential standard ruler” by Leonardo Giani (Swinburne University of Technology), Cullan Howlet (U. Queensland), Chris Blake (Swinburne), Ryan J. Turner (Australia National University) and Tamara M. Davis (U. Queensland) – all in Australia. This paper argues that velocity coherence scale, a measure that identifies the transition point of galaxy motion from correlated to anti-correlated, could potentially characterize the onset of cosmic homogeneity.

The overlay looks like this:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117075588846174571

The third paper of the week, also published on Tuesday 11th Augus, but in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “A GLIMPSE of the 99%: a census of the faintest galaxies during the epoch of reionization and its implications for galaxy formation models” by Hakim Atek (Sorbonne Université, Paris, France) and 21 others based around the world.

The overlay is here:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117075737363441518

The fourth and final paper of the week was published on Wednesday 12th August in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies: “Dust and Grain Size Evolution in Galaxy Simulations: What Matters and What Does Not” by Massimiliano Parente & Desika Narayanan (U. Florida, USA) and Paul Torrey (U. Virginia, USA) presents the first implementation of an evolving dust grain size distribution within a model of galaxy evolution, successfully reproducing key observational constraints and exploring the mechanisms shaping galaxies.

The overlay is here:

The officially-accepted version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117081036416703046

That’s all for this week. We’re just ticking over at the moment, and steadily building up a backlog of papers to publish while we wait for authors to put their final versions on arXiv. I have a feeling there’s going to be a big splurge sometime. Will it be next week? We’ll find out next Saturday!

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics 08/08/2026

Although it’s holiday season for some, it’s time once more for another Saturday 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 167 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 615.

I 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 was published on Tuesday 4th August in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies with the title “Small-scale turbulence alongside large-scale turbulence in a z=1.87 star-forming galaxy with an outflowing wind, revealed by multi-point structure functions” by Itzhak Goldman (Afeka College, Israel). A previous study by the author found evidence of large and small scale turbulence in the star-forming galaxy CSWA13, suggesting that star clusters and large clumps within the galaxy could be driving this turbulence.

The overlay for this paper is here

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117036181269903989

The second paper for this week, published on Thursday 6th August in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “From Clumps to Sheets: Geometry Controls the Temperature PDF of Multi-Phase Gas” by Zirui Chen and S. Peng Oh (UC Santa Barbara, USA). This study uses 3D hydrodynamic simulations to show that the temperature probability distribution functions (PDFs) of multi-phase turbulent gas differ significantly under interstellar medium (ISM) and circumgalactic medium (CGM) conditions.

The overlay looks like this:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117047322340826393

The third paper of the week, published on Thursday 6th August in folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics is “First Detection of Extensive Air Showers Using a Small-Aperture Fluorescence Telescope” by M. Zotov (M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia) and 7 others based in Russia and Armenia. The study reports the first-ever detection of extensive air showers from ultra-high-energy cosmic rays using a compact fluorescence telescope, employing both conventional and deep learning analysis methods.

The overlay is here:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117047408583672745

The fourth and final paper of the week was published on Friday 7th August in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics: “TDCOSMO XXVI: Uniform Lens Modeling of Eight Doubly Imaged Quasars“, by Ryan Brady (Stony Brook University, USA) and 9 others based all around the world, presents a new method for analyzing doubly imaged quasars using the Hubble Space Telescope, revealing that arc surface brightness is key to precision in mass model measurements.

The overlay is here:

The officially-accepted version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/117053056092162466

That’s all for this week. We have about a dozen more papers accepted and waiting for the authors to put the final version on arXiv, which they will presumably do when they’re back from holiday. I’ll do an update next weekend and we’ll see!

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics 25/07/2026

It’s time once more for another Saturday update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further nine papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 160 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 608.

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 was published on Tuesday 21st July in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. The title is “Characterization of the Polarization Beam Response of SPT-3G Using Point Sources” by Tijmen de Haan (Institute of Particle and Nuclear Studies, Ibaraki, Japan) and an international cast of 101 others. This study presents measurements of the South Pole Telescope’s polarized beam response, indicating minimal sidelobe depolarization. The findings suggest potential explanations for frequency-dependent residuals in power spectrum analysis.

The overlay for this paper is here

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116956682988048349

The second paper for this week, also published on Tuesday 21st July but in the folder Earth and Planetary Astrophysics is: “Exploring TRAPPIST-1 Climate States with an Energy Balance Model” by Jacob Haqq-Misra (Blue Marble Space, USA). The study uses a modified HEXTOR energy balance model to predict climate states of terrestrial planets orbiting low-mass stars, suggesting partial to complete ice cover for TRAPPIST-1 e and f.Abstractfor Exploring TRAPPIST-1 Climate States with an Energy Balance Model.

The overlay looks like this:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116956824712105776

The third paper of the week, also published on Tuesday 21st July, but in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies is “A first systematic study of [OIII] 88μm at z>8: two luminous oxygen lines and a powerful ionized outflow in the first 600 million years” by Hiddo Algera (Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Taipei, Taiwan) and 37 others from all around the world. This paper presents deep observations of four UV-bright, gravitationally lensed galaxies, revealing an ionized outflow in one and highlighting the diagnostic power of [O III]88 μm in studying galaxies in the early Universe.

The overlay for this one is here:

The final, accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116956879536002543

The fourth paper of the week, published on Thursday 23rd July in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “Mapping CO Ice in a Star-Forming Filament in the 3 kpc Arm with JWST” by Savannah Gramze (U. Florida, USA) and 16 others based all around the world. This paper shows that JWST observations and ALMA Band 3 data reveal that 50-88% of CO gas in a star-forming filament is locked in ice; corrections are needed for mass measurements in such systems.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can read the final version of this one on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116968030387635232

The fifth paper of the week, also published on Thursday 23rd July but in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, is “Viscously Spreading Accretion Disks around Black Holes: Implications for TDEs, LFBOTs and other Transients“. This article presents a time-dependent model of accretion disks around black holes, explaining late-time emission in tidal disruption events and luminous fast blue optical transients and future detectability of such events.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can read the final version of this one on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116968076410638262

The sixth paper of this week is “Characterising the response of an International LOFAR Station” by Letizia Vincetti (Trinity Collge Dublin, Ireland) and 9 others based in Ireland, USA, The Netherlands and Sweden. This was also published on Thursday July 23rd and is in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. The article presents an investigation of the performance and calibration challenges of phased-array radio interferometers, using the Irish LOFAR station as a case study, highlighting the importance of accurate beam modelling, etc.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can find the final accepted version on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116968134127626260

The seventh paper of this week is “Exo Skryer: A JAX-accelerated sub-stellar atmospheric retrieval framework” by Elspeth K.H. Lee (U. Bern, Switzerland). Published on Friday 24th July in the folder Earth and Planetary Astrophysics, this article introduces “Exo Skryer”, a new, efficient framework for exoplanet and brown dwarf atmospheric research, capable of handling large data sets and complex models.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can find the final accepted version on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116974013616759329

The (penultimate) eighth paper of this week is “GCR Spectra Reconstructed with Neutron Monitor Yield Function and Artificial Neural Networks: Comparison of Two Methods” by Stepan A. Siruk (Moscow Engineering Physics Institute MEPhI, Russia) and four others, all based in Russia. Published on Friday 24th July in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics, this article presents a framework using artificial neural networks and neutron monitors to reconstruct cosmic-ray energy spectra, providing data even in the absence of direct satellite observations.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can find the final accepted version on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116974048321854911

And finally for this week we have “The failed failed-supernova scenario of M31-2014-DS1” by Noam Soker (Technion, Israel), a paper which challenges the failed-supernova theory for the fading of the yellow supergiant event M31-2014-DS1, suggesting it requires unlikely parameters and supports an alternative scenario involving violent binary interaction. This was published on Friday 24th July in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can find the final accepted version on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116974082942533765

And that concludes the update of this week’s business. As it was foretold, the total number of publications at OJAp has now passed the 600 mark, and the likely number for 2026 is around 300. We published a paper in five of the six astro-ph categories this week, but still haven’t had a week when we’ve published a full house with at least one in all six…

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics 18/07/2026

It’s time once more for another Saturday 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 151 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 599.

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 Tuesday 14th July, is “On combining estimated and analytic covariance matrices” by Alan Heavens (Imperial College London, UK), Lorne Whiteway (University College, London, UK) and Elena Sellentin (Leiden University, The Netherlands). This article, published in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, presents an accurate approximation for the combined likelihood function in cosmological data analysis, improving upon previous methods by better representing the heavy tails of the true distribution.

The overlay for this paper is here

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116916991519124229

The second paper for this week, also published on Tuesday 14th July in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics is: “Line-of-sight shear in SLACS strong lenses II: validation tests with an extended sample” by Natalie B. Hogg (U. Cambridge, UK), Daniel P. Johnson (Université de Montpellier, France), Anowar J. Shajib (U. Chicago, USA) and Julien Larena (Montpellier). The study described in this paper models 27 additional gravitational lenses, finding a significant fraction with unexpectedly large line-of-sight shears. Factors like redshift, filter, and signal-to-noise ratio don’t significantly affect shear magnitudes.

The overlay looks like this:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116917026598474399

The third paper of the week, published on Wednesday 15th July, again in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics “Investigating the Dark Energy Constraint from Strongly Lensed AGN at LSST-Scale” by Sydney Erickson (Stanford University, USA) and 13 others on behalf of The LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration. The study uses a new technique to analyze a large sample of lensed Active Galactic Nuclei, providing an independent probe of dark energy and improving constraints on the Universe’s expansion.

The overlay for this one is here:

The final, accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116922734297811558

The fourth paper of the week, also published on Wednesday 15th July but in the folder Earth and Planetary Astrophysics is “University of Hawaii 88-inch Telescope Observations of the Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS: Spectrophotometric Blue-Sensitive Spectral Time Series Spanning Two Months from Discovery” by W. B. Hoogendam (University of Hawaii, USA) and 24 others from around the world. The study presents observations of the third interstellar object, 3I/ATLAS, using the SuperNova Integral Field Spectrograph, revealing its properties and comparing it to bodies in our solar system.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can read the final version of this one on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116925616134490970

The fifth paper of the week, published on Friday 17th July in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “The birth of the intracluster medium: the evolution of multiphase gas and Lyman-α haloes in a z~3 simulated protocluster” by Jake S. Bennett (Harvard Smithsonian CfA, USA), Aaron Smith (U. Nottingham, UK), Fabrizio Arrigoni-Battaia (MPA Garching, Germany), Debora Sijacki (U. Cambridge, UK) , Cassandra Lochhaas (CfA) and Lars Hernquist (CfA). This study uses a cosmological simulation to explore the transition from complex galactic haloes to mature galaxy clusters, focusing on gas distribution, ionisation, and emission changes during this evolution.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can read the final version of this one on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116934117289387295

The sixth and final paper of this week is “Density reconstruction from biased tracers: Testing the equivalence principle through consistency relations” by Lawrence Dam and Omar Darwish (Université de Genève, Switzerland). This was published on Friday 17th July in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. It proposes using quadratic estimators to test the weak equivalence principle on cosmological scales, offering a practical alternative to the conventional bispectrum approach.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can find the final accepted version on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116934191977670070

As you can see we have now published over 150 papers this year and are just one shy of 600 in total. I expect we’ll pass that milestone next week. I’ll do another update next Saturday.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics 11/07/2026

Back home to Maynooth, just in time for another Saturday update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further nine papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 145 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 593.

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 Tuesday 7th July, is “The Information Content of Quasar Variability Light Curves: How Well Can we Infer Stochastic Model Parameters?” by Brendon Brewer (U. Auckland, NZ), Geraint F. Lewis (U. Sydney, AU), Xiang Yu & Yuan Li (Auckland). Published in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, this study suggests that quasar variability studies should focus on the short term volatility parameter, as it’s more informative than the variability timescale. Volatility decreases with redshift suggesting intrinsic effects.

The overlay for this paper is here

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116877118638227811

The second paper for this week, also published on Tuesday 7th July, but in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, is “Cygnus X-3 as a PeVatron and the LHAASO 2025 data” by Michael Kachelriess & E. Lammert (NTNU, Trondheim, Norway). This paper suggests that the high-mass X-ray binary Cygnus X-3 can accelerate cosmic rays beyond PeV energies, contributing to a photon flux peaking around PeV energies.

The overlay looks like this:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116877369307135417

The third paper of the week, also published on Tuesday 7th July, but in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics is “The DESI DR1 Peculiar Velocity Survey: growth rate measurements from galaxy and momentum correlation functions” by Ryan J Turner (Swinburne Institute of Technology, Australia) and 63 others from around the world. This paper analyzes local peculiar velocity and galaxy density fields to test cosmological models of gravity, finding results consistent with predictions from Planck+ΛCDM cosmology and general relativity.

The overlay for this one is here:

The final, accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116877601913437714

The fourth paper of the week, published on Wednesday 8th July in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics , is “Morphological Fingerprints of Forbush Decreases and Their Relation to Geomagnetic Storm Severity” by Juan Diego Perez Navarro and David Sierra Porta (Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar, Colombia). This article introduces a graph-based method to analyze Forbush decreases (FDs), transient depressions in cosmic-ray flux, and uses network signatures to predict geomagnetic storm intensity.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can read the final version of this one on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116837827227415689

The fifth paper of the week, also published on Wednesday 8th July but in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “On the connection between galaxy orientation and halo absorption properties” by Rohan Venkat, Soo May Wee, and Hsiao-Wen Chen (U. Chicago, USA). This article investigates the azimuthal dependence of metal-line absorption in the circumgalactic medium of 87 isolated galaxies. The results show no significant correlation between absorption strength and azimuthal angle.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can read the final version of this one on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

The sixth paper of this week is “Searching for Periodicity in FRB 20240114A” by Jonathan I Katz (Washington U., USA). This was published on Thursday 9th July in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. The study described in this paper observed FRB 20240114A, an active Fast Radio Burst, but found no significant periodicity in its bursts, contradicting magnetar models predictions.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can find the final accepted version on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116888362191860771

The seventh article for this week is “Multiphase gas in Circumgalactic cloud complexes: Insights from kiloparsec-scale Magnetohydrodynamic Turbulence Simulations” by Rajsekhar Mohapatra (Princeton U., USA), Alankar Dutta (MPA Garching, Germany) and Prateek Sharma (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore). This -paper was also published on Thursday 9th July, in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. This paper uses high-resolution simulations to investigate the mass distribution of the circumgalactic medium (CGM), a diffuse gas surrounding a galaxy’s halo with small-scale clumps of cold gas forming in quiescent regions.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can find the final accepted version of this one on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116888423374478219

The (penultimate) eighth article for this week is “Line-of-sight shear in SLACS strong lenses I: shear and mass model parametrisations” by Natalie B. Hogg (U. Cambridge, UK), Daniel Johnson (U. Montpellier, France), Anowar J. Shajib (U. Chicago, USA) and Julien Larena (Montpellier). This was also published on Thursday 9th July, but in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. This article studies models of 23 strong gravitational lenses to measure line-of-sight shear for the first time, providing potential new constraints on cosmological parameters.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can find the final accepted version on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116888620656683811

The ninth and last article for this week is “Current and future constraints on the expansion history of the GREA model” by Irene Graziotti (INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte, Italy), Chiara De Leo (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy) and Matteo Martinelli (INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma, Italy). This study explores the General Relativistic Entropic Acceleration (GREA) framework, comparing it to the standard description of the universe. Current data favors the standard model, but GREA remains competitive.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can find the officially-accepted version on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116894079326256820

As you can see, it has been a bumper week, especially when you consider that there was no arXiv mailing om Monday July 6th owing to the July 4th holiday in the USA. I should have known this would happen while I was travelling!

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics 04/07/2026

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 seven papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 136 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 584.

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 29th June, is “Analysis and implications of the spatio-spectral morphology of the Fermi Bubbles” by Ami Tank (Indian Institute of Technology) and Roland Crocker & Mark R. Krumholz (Australian National University). Published in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, this paper presents an analysis of the gamma-ray structures of Fermi Bubbles in the Milky Way using a decade of data. The research suggests either hadronic or leptonic processes can explain the data.

The overlay for this paper is here

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116831750056897536

The second paper for this week, also published on Monday 29th June, but in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, is “A first measurement of baryonic feedback with Fast Radio Bursts” by Robert Reischke (Universität Bonn, Germany) and Steffen Hagstotz (Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, Germany). This paper argues that Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) provide a new method to trace baryon distribution and feedback in the cosmos, offering insights into matter distribution and rejecting no-feedback scenarios with high confidence.

The overlay looks like this:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116831826841996152

The third paper of the week, published on Tuesday 30th June in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, is “Idealized Global Models of Accretion Disks with Strong Toroidal Magnetic Fields” by Minghao Guo & Eliot Quataert (Princeton U., USA), Jonathan Squire (U. Otago, NZ), Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech, USA) and James M. Stone (Princeton). This study uses global magnetohydrodynamic simulations to explore the behavior of idealized accretion disks with strong toroidal magnetic fields, finding that these systems maintain a moderately strong mean azimuthal field.

The overlay for this one is here:

The final, accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116837655082737919

The fourth paper of the week, published on Tuesday 30th June in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, is “On the effective spin-mass ratio relation of binary black hole mergers that evolved in isolation” by Sambaran Banerjee (Helmholtz-Instituts für Strahlen und Kernphysik, Germany) and Aleksandra Olejak (MPA Garching, Germany). This study explores mechanisms of binary black hole mergers and finds that certain spin and mass ratio trends can be naturally explained by isolated binary evolution. The overlay for this one is here:

You can read the final version of this one on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116837827227415689

The fifth paper of the week, also published on Tuesday 30th June but in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics is “A systematic survey for hypervelocity runaways from thermonuclear supernovae” by Kareem El-Badry (Caltech, USA), and 18 others based in the USA, Germany, Austria and the UK. This paper presents a systematic survey of hypervelocity runaways, resulting from white dwarf explosions in binary systems. The findings suggest a diversity of remnant masses, ages, and heating mechanisms, challenging theoretical models.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can read the final version of this one on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116837896833204693

The sixth and penultimate paper of this week is “Boris and Exponential Integrators in the Theory of Particles Interacting with Magnetic Turbulence” by Andreas Shalchi (U. Manitoba, Canada). This was published on Wednesday 1st July, in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (it is posted in the plasma physics section of aXiv but cross-listed in solar and stellar astrophysics). The study compares the Rodrigues and Boris integrators in test-particle simulations of charged particles interacting with magnetic fields, finding both methods yield similar results.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can find the final accepted version on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116843121887902595

The seventh and final paper for this week is “Inflation at the End of 2025: Constraints on $r$ and $n_S$ using the Latest CMB and BAO Data” by Lennart Balkenhol (Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, France) and 12 others based in France, Italy, Switzerland, UK, USA and Australia. This was also published on Wednesday 1st July, in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. This study presents constraints on parameters of inflationary models in cosmology, using the latest cosmic microwave background and baryon acoustic oscillation data. The findings help differentiate between inflation models.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can find the final accepted version of this one on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116843339514720727

And that concludes this week’s update. We’re starting to catch up on the backlog generated in June. At just past the halfway point of the year, which is where we are, we’re on 136 papers, which suggests a total around 272 for the year.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics 27/06/2026

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 three papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 129 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 577.

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 Tuesday 23rd June, is “Interpretable machine learning of halo gas density profiles: a sensitivity analysis of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations” by Daniele Sorini & Sownak Bose (Durham University, UK), Mathilda Denison (U. Penn., USA) and Romeel Davé (University of Edinburgh, UK). This study uses cosmological hydrodynamical simulations and a random forest algorithm to understand how feedback processes affect the gas distribution in galaxies by predicting gas density profiles in various models. 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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116798189799110714

The second paper for this week, published on Wednesday June 24th in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies is “Dual-disk galaxies and thermal states of circumgalactic medium” by Masafumi Noguchi (Tohoku University, Japan). This paper explores the suggestion that the transition from thick to dual-disk galaxies is influenced by thermal changes in the circumgalactic medium (CGM), which also affects star formation.

The overlay looks like this:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116803879351605451

The third and finnal paper of the week, published on Friday 26th June in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, is “Mass Transfer in Tidally Heated Stars Orbiting Massive Black Holes and Implications for Repeating Nuclear Transients” by Philippe Z. Yao and Eliot Quataert (Princeton University, USA). This paper discusses how tidal heating alters the structure of stars near supermassive black holes, affecting mass transfer rates and potentially leading to low-luminosity active galactic nuclei and transient stellar phenomena.

The overlay for this one is here:

The final, accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116815332283834010

And that concludes this week’s update. It has been another slow week on the publishing front. We have a steadily growing backlog of papers accepted for publication but with final versions yet to appear on arXiv. I suppose it’s the holidays…

P.S. The other day I checked the stats for the Open Journal of Astrophysics and saw that we’ve passed 8,000 citations. The average number of citations per paper is 14.0, which is not bad when you consider that over half the papers were published under a year ago…

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics 20/06/2026

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 three 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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116753183446523072

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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116758595971333611

The third paper of the week, published on Wednesday 17th June in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics is “The Non-Gaussian Weak-Lensing Likelihood: A Multivariate Copula Construction and Impact on Cosmological Constraints” by Veronika Oehl and Tilman Tröster (both of ETH Zurich, Switzerland). This study presents a framework for computing non-Gaussian likelihoods for correlation functions, particularly useful in large-scale weak-lensing surveys. It suggests Gaussian likelihoods are sufficient for stage-IV surveys.

The overlay for this one is here:

The final, accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116764509657843733

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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116764428903842241

And that concludes this week’s update. It has been a slow week on the publishing front, but the main reason is that we have a big backlog of papers accepted but 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.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics 13/06/2026

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 three papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 122 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 570.

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 Thursday 11th June, is “Dancing Streams In Merging Halos: Stellar Streams in a MW–LMC-like merger” by (all based in the USA): Sachi Weerasooriya (Carnegie Observatories), Tjitske Starkenburg (Northwestern U.), Emily C. Cunningham (Columbia U.) & Kathryn V. Johnston (Flatiron Institute). This article explores how galaxy mergers, like the Milky Way-Large Magellanic Cloud merger, significantly alter the properties and structures of stellar streams, challenging the recovery of their initial orbits. It is in the folder marked 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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116730200889106529

The second paper for this week, also published on Thursday 11th June but in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics is “X-SORTER (X-ray Survey Of meRging clusTErs in Redmapper): X-ray and Spectroscopic Characterization of 12 Optically Selected Galaxy Cluster Merger Candidates” by Christopher Hopp, David Wittman, Rodrigo Stancioli, Zhuoran Gao & Faik Bouhrik (UC Davis) and Scott Adler (Rochester), all based in the USA. The X-SORTER program identifies merging galaxy clusters to study dark matter interactions, using optical indicators and X-ray observations. This method efficiently identifies active clusters suitable for detailed dark matter studies.

The overlay for this one looks like this:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116730279994960097

The third and final paper of the week, published on Friday 12th June in the folder Earth and Planetary Astrophysics, is “JCMT Constraints on the Early-Time HCN and CO Emission and HCN Temporal Evolution of 3I/ATLAS” by Jason T. Hinkle (U. Illinois, USA) and 6 others based in the USA and Chile. This article presents observations of the third Interstellar Object, 3I/ATLAS, providing early sub-mm constraints on its activity. The findings suggest a steeper production rate slope than typical Solar System comets.

The overlay for this one is here:

The final, accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116735805179724489

And that concludes this week’s update. It has been a slow week on the publishing front, but the main reason is that we have a big backlog of papers accepted but 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.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 30/05/2026

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.

The first paper to report this week, published on Monday 25th May is “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. This study presents evidence that “black hole stars” (BH*), early stages of black hole growth, power Little Red Dots (LRDs) and every massive black hole may have been a BH*.

The overlay for this paper is here

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116633975428093674

The second paper for this week, also published on Monday 25th May but in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, is “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. The study uses machine learning to detect unrecognized blends in deep ground-based imaging, improving sample purity and potentially enhancing accuracy in future cosmological 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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116634039240557325

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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116594304124291605

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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116639604621500984

And that concludes this week’s update. I’ll do another one next Saturday.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 23/05/2026

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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116594222032390191

The second paper for this week, also published on Monday 18th May but in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, is “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 other authors from all round the world. This paper presents a cosmological analysis of correlations between the DESI-DR1 Bright Galaxy Survey and Luminous Red Galaxy samples and overlapping shear measurements from various weak lensing 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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116594256215421009

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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116594304124291605

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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116607468481260244

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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116617293753093751

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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116617404344791486

And that concludes this week’s update. I’ll do another one next Saturday.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 16/05/2026

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 104 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 552. It took us until late July to pass 100 last 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.

The first paper to report this week, published on Monday 11th May in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena is “Triaxial magnetars as sources of fast radio bursts” by Jonathan I Katz (Washington University, USA). This paper suggests that the mysterious properties of Fast Radio Bursts (FRB) could be explained by triaxial magnetars, with their activity levels influenced by precessional time scales.

The overlay for this paper is here

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116554775791392800

The second paper for this week, published on Tuesday 12th May in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “The Abundance of Thin Dwarf Galaxies: a Challenge for Cosmological Simulations” by Jose Benavides & Laura V. Sales (UC Riverside, USA), Julio F. Navarro (U. Victoria, Canada), Simon D. M. White (MPA Garching, Germany), and Carlos S. Frenk, Kyle A. Oman & Shaun Cole (U. Durham, UK). Depending on mass up to 40% of galaxies are intrinsically flat, a fraction that numerical models of galaxy formation struggle to reproduce suggesting the models are incomplete.

The overlay for this one is here:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116560106342500157

Next one up, the third paper of the week, also published on Tuesday 12th May but in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics is “Cosmological peculiar velocities in general relativity” by Chris Clarkson (Queen Mary, University of London, UK) and Roy Maartens (U. Western Cape, South Africa). This paper refutes claims that the 1+3 covariant approach to cosmological perturbation theory predicts stronger growth of galaxy peculiar velocities, arguing that standard treatments are correct and fully relativistic.

The overlay for this one is here:

The final, accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116560224426499932

The fourth paper this week, published on Wednesday May 13th “Possible evidence for a pair-instability supernova nature of ultra-early JWST sources” by Andrea Ferrara & Stefano Carniani (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy), Takahiro Morishita (California Institute of Technology, USA), and Massimo Stiavelli (Space Telescope Science Institute, USA). Published in the section Astrophysics of Galaxies. This paper argues that recent observations challenge early galaxy formation models, suggesting that the bright source, Capotauro, could be a supernova from a massive, metal-free star, not a luminous galaxy as initially thought.

The overlay is here:

The officially accepted version can be found on arXiv here and here is the Mastodon announcement:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116566147448743997

The fifth and final article of this week was also published on Wednesday 13th May but in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. The title is “Evolving and interacting dark energy: photometric and spectroscopic synergy with DES Y3 and DESI DR2” and it is by Maria Tsedrik and Benjamin Bose (University of Edinburgh, UK). The study investigates the Dark Scattering interacting dark energy scenario, using data from various sources. Results show no evidence of dark-sector interaction and a preference for the Chevallier-Polarski-Linder parametrisation.

The overlay is here:

You can find the authorized version of this paper on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116566165139100860

And that concludes this week’s update. I’ll do another next Saturday.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 09/05/2026

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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116526323790020433

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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116526449130876366

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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116526251813375105

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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116531924397498394

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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116537709130989142

Here endeth this week’s update. There shall be another next Saturday.

P.S. Just a reminder that, thanks to the efforts of a member of our Editorial Board, the Open Journal of Astrophysics now has a Wikipedia page.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 02/05/2026

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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116480407578621011

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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116480505354195181

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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116486649450860283

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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116492226856595031

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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116492282488422075

The sixth paper of the week is “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. This article was also published on Thursday April 30th in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. It presents a framework for predicting dispersion measures of fast radio bursts using the baryonification model, providing a cost-effective alternative to hydrodynamical simulations. The model’s accuracy is validated through full numerical simulations. The overlay is here:

You can find the officially-accepted version on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116492403170125062

Seventh and finally for this week we have “The stellar and dark matter distributions in early-type galaxies measured by stacked weak gravitational lensing” by Momoka Fujikawa and Masamune Oguri (Chiba University, Japan). This study uses weak gravitational lensing to investigate stellar mass and dark matter density in red galaxies, suggesting a stronger feedback effect than current simulations predict. This was published on Friday 1st May 2026 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The overlay is here:

You can find the officially-accepted version on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116497987401632687

And that concludes this week’s update. I’ll do another one at the end of next week. Will Vol. 9 have reached a hundred by then?

P.S. Just a reminder that, thanks to the efforts of a member of our Editorial Board, the Open Journal of Astrophysics now has a Wikipedia page.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 25/04/2026

So here we are again, on a Saturday morning, with 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 87 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 535.

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 “Bayesian Cosmic Void Finding with Graph Flows” by Leander Thiele (U. Tokyo, Japan). This was published on Monday 20th April in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. The paper presents a method using a deep graph neural network to identify cosmic voids in sparse galaxy surveys, improving upon traditional deterministic algorithms by considering the problem’s probabilistic nature. The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116435864086025246

The second paper for this week, published on Wednesday 22nd April in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “Sifting for a Stream: The Morphology of the 300S Stellar Stream” by Benjamin Cohen (U. Chicago, USA) and 20 others distributed around the world. This study analyzes the morphology of the $300S$ stellar stream, revealing three density peaks, a possible gap, and a kink, suggesting significant influence from the Large Magellanic Cloud on its structure.

The overlay for this one is here:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116447005556180402

Next one up, the third paper of the week, is “IRMaGiC: Extending Luminous Red Galaxy Selection into the Infrared with Joint Rubin Observatory’s Large Survey of Space Time and Roman’s High Latitude Imaging Survey” by Zhiyuan Guo & Chris. W. Walter (Duke U., USA) and Eli S. Rykoff (Stanford U., USA) on behalf of the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration. This was published on Wednesday April 22nd in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. The paper introduces IRMaGiC, an algorithm that improves the selection and redshift estimation of Luminous Red Galaxies (LRGs) by incorporating infrared data, enhancing future cosmological surveys.

The overlay for this one is here:

The final, accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116447067337351283

The fourth paper this week, published on Thursday April 23rd, is “The Diagnostic Temperature Discrepancy as Evidence for Non-Maxwellian Coronal Electrons” by Victor Edmonds (Final Stop Consulting, USA). This paper, in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics, presents two methods of measuring electron temperature in the quiet solar corona yielding different results, suggesting non-Maxwellian electron velocity distributions may be responsible for the discrepancy.

The overlay is here:

The finally accepted version of this paper can be found here and the Mastodon announcement follows:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116452775389963618

The fifth and final paper for this week was published on Friday 24th April in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The title is “Galaxy evolution in the post-merger regime. IV – The long-term effect of mergers on galactic stellar mass growth and distribution” by Sara L. Ellison (U. Victoria, Canada) and Leonardo Ferreira (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande, Brazil). This study uses a large sample of post-merger galaxies to demonstrate that galaxy mergers trigger significant and extended stellar mass growth in their central regions, independent of stellar population modelling.

The overlay is here:

You can find the authorized version of this paper on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116458316824739014

The overlay for this one is here:

You can find the officially-accepted version on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116458316824739014

And that concludes this week’s update. I’ll do another one at the end of next week.

P.S. Thanks to the efforts of a member of our Editorial Board, the Open Journal of Astrophysics now has a Wikipedia page.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 18/04/2026

It is Saturday morning, and therefore time for yet 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 82 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 530.

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 “Beyond Spherical geometry: Unraveling complex features of objects orbiting around stars from its transit light curve using deep learning” by Ushasi Bhowmick & Shivam Kumaran (Indian Space Research Institute, Ahmedabad, India). This study uses deep neural networks to predict the shape of objects orbiting stars based on their transit light curves, demonstrating the potential to extract geometric information from these systems. It was published on Monday 13th April in the folder Earth and Planetary Astrophysics and the overlay can be seen here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116395992732332356

The second paper for this week, also published on Monday 13th April Apil in the folder but in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “statmorph-lsst: Quantifying and correcting morphological biases in galaxy surveys” by Elizaveta Sazonova (U. Waterloo, Canada) and an international cast of 18 others. This paper presents an investigation of potential biases in quantitative morphology metrics used in galaxy evolution studies, proposing two new measurements to resolve biases, and provides a related Python package (statmorph-lsst), which can be found here on github.

The overlay for this one is here:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116396069424189312

Next one up, the third paper of the week, one of four published on Friday 17th April, is “Disentangling the galactic and intergalactic components in 313 observed Lyman-alpha line profiles between redshift 0 and 5” by Siddhartha Gurung-López (Universitat de València, Spain) and 7 others based in Spain and Germany. Published in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, this paper uses the zELDA package to analyze Lyman-alpha photons from star-forming galaxies, revealing IGM effects dominate Lyman-alpha observability at high redshifts, while galactic outflows become more important at lower z.

The overlay for this one is here:

The final, accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116418831864134501

The fourth paper this week, also published on Friday 17th April is “Using Symbolic Regression to Emulate the Radial Fourier Transform of the Sérsic Profile for Fast, Accurate and Differentiable Galaxy Profile Fitting” by Tim B. Miller (Northwestern University, USA) and Imad Pasha (Yale University, USA). This one is published in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics: it develops an emulator for galaxy profile fitting in Fourier space, improving speed by 2.5 times with minimal accuracy loss, aiding in managing increasing data flow.

The overlay is here:

The finally accepted version of this paper can be found here and the Mastodon announcement follows:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116418855010158656

The fifth paper for this week is “The THESAN project: Lyman-alpha emitters as probes of ionized bubble sizes” by Meredith Neyer (MIT, USA) and 6 others based in the USA, Colombia, Canada, Japan and UK. The study uses THESAN simulations to explore how Lyman-alpha emitters (LAEs) trace ionized bubble sizes during the Epoch of Reionization, providing a framework for interpreting LAE surveys. This was published on Friday 17th April in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies.

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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116418887225003954

The sixth and final paper for this week is “Closed-Form Statistical Relations Between Projected Separation, Semimajor Axis, Companion Mass, and Host Acceleration” by Timothy D Brandt (Space Telescope Science Institute, USA). This was published on Friday 17th April in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. In this paper the author derives statistical relationships between radial velocity, a companion’s mass, and projected separation, useful for calculations requiring derivatives. The results are verified with empirical comparisons to existing literature.

The overlay for this one is here:

You can find the officially-accepted version on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116418938017199814

And that concludes this week’s update. I’ll do another one at the end of next week.

P.S. Just a reminder, for those of you into LinkedIn, that we now have a page there.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 11/04/2026

With permission, I have time for yet another Saturday morning 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 76 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 524.

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 “Lagrangian versus Eulerian Methods for Toroidally-Magnetized Isothermal Disks” by Yashvardhan Tomar and Philip F. Hopkins (California Institute of Technology, USA). This study re-evaluates previous research on toroidally-magnetized disks, using two Lagrangian methods. The results suggest that sustained midplane toroidal fields in recent simulations are not a numerical artefact. It was published on Tuesday April 7th 2026 in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116362395042011770

The second paper for this week, published on Wednesday 8th Apil in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics, is “Teaching Astronomy with Large Language Models” by Yuan-Sen Ting and Teaghan O’Briain (Ohio State University, USA). The paper introduces AstroTutor, an AI-enhanced astronomy tutoring system, to improve undergraduate astronomy education and AI literacy. It found that structured AI integration can enhance learning and critical evaluation skills. The primary classification on arXiv for this paper is physics.ed-ph but it is cross-listed on astro-ph which qualifies it for consideration.

The overlay for this one is here:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116368195945602700

Next one up, the third paper of the week, also published on Wednesday 8th April, is “Statistical Predictions of the Accreted Stellar Halos around Milky Way-Like Galaxies” by J. Sebastian Monzon & Frank C. van den Bosch (Yale University, USA) and Martin P. Rey (University of Bath, UK). This one was published in the section Astrophysics of Galaxies; it describes new model to track formation of stellar halos in Milky Way-like galaxies, revealing their sensitivity to the fate of the largest satellite and whether accretion is early or late.

The overlay for this one is here:

The final, accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

The fourth paper this week, published on Thursday 9th April is “A Tale of Tails: Star Formation and Stripping in Jellyfish Galaxies in the Strong Lensing Cluster MACS J0138.0-2155” by Catherine C. Gibson, Jackson H. O’Donnell and Tesla E. Jeltema (UC Santa Cruz, USA). This investigates the effects of ram-pressure stripping on four galaxies, focusing on their stellar and gas kinematics, star formation rates, and galactic structure and is published in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies.

The overlay is here:

The finally accepted version of this paper can be found here and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116374103962641944

The fifth and final paper for this week is “Investigating ionising sources and the complex interstellar medium of GHZ2 at z=12.3” by M. Castellano (INAF Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma, Italy) and 29 others based all around the world. This was also published on Thursday 9th April in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The paper uses deep observations of galaxy GHZ2 to explore the sources of ionising radiation and interstellar medium properties at cosmic dawn. Findings suggest a stratified environment and a hard ionising radiation component.

The overlay for this one is here:

The officially-accepted version of this one can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116374246020924265

That concludes this week’s update. I’ll do another one at the end of next week, when the Easter vacations will be over.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 04/04/2026

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.

The first paper to report this week is “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). This paper was published on Tuesday March 31st in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116322295318460212

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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116322348900996677

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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116322403314492269

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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116328145696781139

And that concludes the update for this week. I’ll do another next week, but I’m expecting a fairly low number of papers owing to the Easter vacation.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 07/02/2026

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 a further six papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 24 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 472.

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 announcement also show the DOI for each paper.

The first paper to report this week is “The Impact of Star Formation and Feedback Recipes on the Stellar Mass and Interstellar Medium of High-Redshift Galaxies” by Harley Katz (U. Chicago, USA), Martin P. Rey (U. Oxford, UK), Corentin Cadiou (Lund U., Sweden) Taysun Kimm (Yonsei U., Korea) and Oscar Agertz (Lund). This paper was published on Monday 2nd February 2026 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It introduces MEGATRON, a new model for galaxy formation simulations, highlighting that feedback energy controls star formation at high redshift and highlighting the importance of the interstellar medium.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116000695648050758

The second paper is “Photometric Redshifts in JWST Deep Fields: A Pixel-Based Alternative with DeepDISC” by Grant Merz (U. Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and 6 others, all based in the USA. This paper was published on Monday February 2nd 2026 in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. This paper explores the effectiveness of the DeepDISC machine learning algorithm in estimating photometric redshifts from near-infrared data, demonstrating its potential for larger image volumes and spectroscopic samples

The overlay for this one is here:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116000777572439111

Next, published on Wednesday 4th February in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “Inferring Interstellar Medium Density, Temperature, and Metallicity from Turbulent H II Regions” by Larrance Xing (U. Chicago, USA), Nicholas Choustikov (U. Oxford, UK), Harley Katz (U. Chicago) and Alex J. Cameron (DAWN, Denmark). This paper argues that supersonic turbulenc affects the interpretation of H II region properties, potentially impacting inferred metallicity, ionization, and excitation from in nebular emission lines, motivating more extensive modelling.

The overlay is here:

The official version can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116011384659092223

The fourth paper this week, also published on Wednesday 4th February, but in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics, is “A Systematic Search for Big Dippers in ASAS-SN” by B. JoHantgen, D. M. Rowan, R. Forés-Toribio, C. S. Kochanek, & K. Z. Stanek (Ohio State University, USA), B. J. Shappee (U. Hawaii, USA), Subo Dong (Peking University), J. L. Prieto Universidad Diego Portales, Chile) and Todd A. Thompson (Ohio State). This study identifies 4 new dipper stars and 15 long-period eclipsing binary candidates using ASAS-SN light curves and multi-wavelength data, categorizing them based on their characteristics.

Here is the overlay:

The official version can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116011460612040834

Fifth, and next to last this week we have “Unveiling the drivers of the Baryon Cycles with Interpretable Multi-step Machine Learning and Simulations” by Mst Shamima Khanom, Benjamin W. Keller and Javier Ignacio Saavedra Moreno (U. Memphis, USA). This paper was published on Thursday 5th February 2026 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. This study uses machine learning methods to understand how galaxies lose or retain baryons, highlighting the relationship between baryon fraction and various galactic measurements.

The overlay is here:

The accepted version can be found on arXiv here, and the fediverse announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116016883984380622

Finally for this week we have “The Bispectrum of Intrinsic Alignments: II. Precision Comparison Against Dark Matter Simulations” by Thomas Bakx (Utrecht U., Netherlands), Toshiki Kurita (MPA Garching, Germany), Alexander Eggemeier (U. Bonn, Germany), Nora Elisa Chisari (Utrecht) and Zvonimir Vlah (Ruđer Bošković Institute, Croatia). This paper was accepted in December, but publication got delayed by the Christmas effect so was published on February 6th 2026, in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. This study uses N-body simulations to accurately measure three-dimensional bispectra of halo intrinsic alignments and dark matter overdensities, providing a method to determine higher order shape bias parameters.

The overlay is here:

You can find the published version of the article here, and the Mastodon announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116022562915557971

And that concludes this week’s update. I will do another next Saturday.

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 31/01/2026

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 a further three papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 18 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 466.

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 announcement also show the DOI for each paper.

The first paper to report this week is “Probing Stellar Kinematics with the Time-Asymmetric Hanbury Brown and Twiss Effect” by Lucijana Stanic (University of Zurich, Switzerland) and 13 others based in Zurich, Lausanne and Geneva (all in Switzerland). This was published on Monday 26th January 2026 in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. This research demonstrates that intensity interferometry can reveal internal stellar kinematics, providing a new way to observe stellar dynamics with high time resolution.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/115961234375736584

The second paper is “DIPLODOCUS I: Framework for the evaluation of relativistic transport equations with continuous forcing and discrete particle interactions” by Christopher N Everett & Garret Cotter (University of Oxford, UK). This was published on Tuesday January 27th 2026 in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. DIPLODOCUS is a new framework for mesoscopic modelling of astrophysical systems, using an integral formulation of relativistic transport equations and a discretisation procedure for particle distributions.

The overlay for this one is here:

The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/115966199181415094

Next, also published on Tuesday January 27th but in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics we have “The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: DR6 Sunyaev-Zel’dovich Selected Galaxy Clusters Catalog” by M. Aguena et al. (101 authors altogether), on behalf of the ACT-DES-HSC Collaboration. This article reports on the discovery of 10,040 galaxy clusters in the Atacama Cosmology Telescope data, including 1,180 clusters at high redshifts, using the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect.

The overlay is here:

The official version can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/115966458299870033

And finally for this week we have a paper published yesterday, Friday 30th January 2026, in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. This is the paper I blogged about yesterday: “A Cosmic Miracle: A Remarkably Luminous Galaxy at zspec = 14.44 Confirmed with JWST” by Rohan Naidu (MIT Kavli Institute) and an international cast of 45 others. This article reports on the discovery by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) of a bright galaxy, MoM-z14, located 280 million years post-Big Bang, that challenges models of galaxy formation and the star-formation history of early galaxies.

The overlay is here:

The accepted version can be found on arXiv here, and the fediverse announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/115982837486159819

And that concludes the update for this week. I will do another next Saturday.

#ACTDESHSCCollaboration #arXiv250511263v2 #arXiv250721459v3 #arXiv250813296v4 #arXiv250913152v2 #AstridSimulations #AstrophysicsOfGalaxies #CosmologyAndNonGalacticAstrophysics #DiamondOpenAccess #DiamondOpenAccessPublishing #DIPLODOCUS #galaxyClusters #galaxyFormation #HanburyBrownAndTwiss #HighEnergyAstrophysicalPhenomena #InstrumentationAndMethodsForAstrophysics #JWST #largeScaleStructureOfTheUniverse #MoMZ14 #OpenAccess #OpenAccessPublishing #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #PlasmaPhysics #relativisticTransportEquations #starFormation #StellarKinematics #SunyaevZeDovichEffect #TheOpenJournalOfAstrophysics

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 10/01/2026

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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/115847068676034973

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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/115853112748106265

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:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/115858972601709198

Finally for this week we have “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. This was published on Friday 9th January (yesterday) in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. This study uses the globular cluster velocity dispersion method to measure the distance to the Sombrero galaxy, finding it to be approximately 9.0 Mpc away. The overlay is here:

The officially accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/115864438724623861

That concludes the update for this week. I will do another next Saturday.

#arXiv250405473v2 #arXiv250616434v3 #arXiv250622367v3 #AstrophysicsOfGalaxies #CosmologyAndNonGalacticAstrophysics #DarkEnergySurvey #DES #DiamondOpenAccess #DiamondOpenAccessPublishing #EarthAndPlanetaryAstrophysics #galaxyClustering #galaxyHalo #OpenAccess #OpenAccessPublishing #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #Planet9 #PowerSpectrum #StellarMass #TheOpenJournalOfAstrophysics #weakGravitationalLensing

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

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

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

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

The overlay is here:

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

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

The corresponding overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

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

The overlay is here:

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

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

The corresponding overlay is here:

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

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

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

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

#arXiv250308779v2 #arXiv250620654v3 #arXiv250719581v2 #arXiv250920651v1 #arXiv250922523v1 #AstrophysicsOfGalaxies #cosmicDipoles #CosmologyAndNonGalacticAstrophysics #DiamondOpenAccess #EarthAndPlanetaryAstrophysics #GalaxyCluster #galaxyFormation #galaxySurveys #JWST #Kepler #LittleRedDots #MultiplanetSystems #nuclearStarClusters #OpenAccessPublishing #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #PopulationIIIStars #ramPressureStripping #SDSSC42028 #semiAnalyticGalaxyFormation #TheOpenJournalOfAstrophysics

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

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

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

The overlay is here:

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

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

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

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

The overlay is here:

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

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

#arXiv250403848v2 #arXiv250510619v2 #arXiv250611233v2 #AstrophysicsOfGalaxies #AttenuationFreeModel #CosmologyAndNonGalacticAstrophysics #DiamondOpenAccess #DiamondOpenAccessPublishing #JWST #LymanContinuum #massiveBlackHoles #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #primordialBlackHoles #ProximityEffect #quasars #TheOpenJournalOfAstrophysics

Happy to announce that my paper on galaxy infall models together with David Benisty is now published in @aanda_journal, thanks a lot to the journal for the great processing!

https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202553892

#GalaxyKinematics #astronomy #astrophysics #AstrophysicsOfGalaxies