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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the overlay:

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

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

Here is the overlay:

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

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

#arXiv240910604v5 #arXiv241001849v2 #arXiv241105083v2 #arXiv250304709v2 #AstrophysicsOfGalaxies #CosmicNoon #DiamondOpenAccess #DiamondOpenAccessPublishing #fineStructureConstant #HighEnergyAstrophysicalPhenomena #HighResolutionSpectroscopy #PlanetaryNebula #reionization #SolarAndStellarAstrophysics #strongGravitationalLensing #SupernovaRemnant #TheOpenJournalOfAstrophysics

Another interesting strong lensing discovery by @NASAWebb : https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.03571
"if a bottom-heavy IMF for elliptical gals is employed, stellar mass estimations increase and can account for the majority of the lensing mass (up to ∼83\%), reducing the need for dark matter"!

#DarkMatter #Cosmology #StrongGravitationalLensing #JWST

These results raise the question where we can track down dark matter? What do we know in the least model-dependent way?
For strong lensing, the question has an answer, look at this video for a recent summary:
https://youtu.be/5FyaoYsCSVg?si=zmokA8g3XPCkoQwF

#astrophysics #astronomy #StrongGravitationalLensing #Cosmology #DarkMatter

2) the Bullet cluster is a more complicated structure than a binary system of two big dark-matter clumps that are offset to the baryons:
arxiv.org/abs/2503.21870
Masses were reduced and bounds on SIDM were set. Looks like we need less dark matter if the structure is more complex!

...and there is also a method to constrain dark matter properties purely from the multiple images, see this NASA press release for more:
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/double-galaxy-mystifies-hubble-astronomers/

#astrophysics #astronomy #StrongGravitationalLensing #Cosmology #DarkMatter

Today was progress-day for lensing!
1) A1689 at z=0.183 is elongated along the line of sight:
arxiv.org/abs/2503.22316
I hope there will be studies of A3827, too. The latter is only at z=0.1 and it seems that the thickness also affects the strong lensing effects:
arxiv.org/abs/2306.11779

#astrophysics #astronomy #StrongGravitationalLensing #Cosmology #DarkMatter

That's quite an interesting read today: new lensing survey data released with 100 strong-lensing galaxy-scale cases:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08777
https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08782
https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08785 (congrats @astronat !)

#astronomy #astrophysics #StrongGravitationalLensing

Through a wine glass, darkly…

Usually I disapprove of using a wine glass for any purpose other than drinking wine, but here’s a very neat short video by Phil Marshall explaining how you can use a one to simulate a strong gravitational lens such as the system that produced the wonderful Einstein ring recently discovered by Euclid. More specifically it shows how perfect alignment leads to a ring whereas other configurations can produce multiple images or arcs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXfUk4Eltkg

If you’re planning to try this at home, please remember to empty your glass beforehand.

#Euclid #PhilMarshall #strongGravitationalLensing #wineGlass

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 01/02/2025

It’s Saturday morning, so once again it’s time for an update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. There were no papers to report last week but since the last update we have published four new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 11 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 246.

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

First one up is  “A halo model approach for mock catalogs of time-variable strong gravitational lenses” by Katsuya T. Abe & Masamune Oguri (Chiba U, Japan), Simon Birrer & Narayan Khadka (Stony Brook, USA), Philip J. Marshall (Stanford, USA), Cameron Lemon (Stockholm U., Sweden), Anupreeta More (IUCAA, India), and the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration. It was published on 27th January 2025 in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. The paper discusses how to generate mock catalogs of strongly lensed QSOs and Supernovae on galaxy-, group-, and cluster-scales based on a halo model that incorporates dark matter halos, galaxies, and subhalos.

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

This paper, also published on Monday 27th January 2025, but in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “The Soltan argument at redshift 6: UV-luminous quasars contribute less than 10% to early black hole mass growth” by Knud Jahnke (MPI Heidelberg, Germany). This paper presents an argument that almost all growth of supermassive black hole mass at z>6 does not take place in UV-luminous quasars.

Here is a screen grab of the overlay, which includes the abstract:You can find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.

The third paper to announce, published on 29th January 2025 in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, is “A Heavy Seed Black Hole Mass Function at High Redshift – Prospects for LISA” by Joe McCaffrey & John Regan (Maynooth U., Ireland), Britton Smith (Edinburgh U., UK), John Wise (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA), Brian O’Shea (Michigan State U., USA) and Michael Norman (University of California, San Diego). This is a numerical study of the growth rates of massive black holes in the early Universe and implications for their detection via gravitational wave emission.

You can see the overlay here:

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

The last paper of this batch is “Forecasting the Detection of Lyman-alpha Forest Weak Lensing from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument and Other Future Surveys” by Patrick Shaw & Rupert A. C. Croft (Carnegie Mellon U., USA) and R. Benton Metcalf (U. Bologna, Italy). This paper, published on January 30th 2025, is about extending the applicationof  Lyman-α forest weak gravitational lensing to lower angular source densities than has previously been done, with forecasts for future spectral surveys. It is in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics.

The overlay is here

You can find the accepted version on arXiv here.

Incidentally, we currently have 121 papers under review, including 81 under a revise and resubmit request.

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

#arXiv240916413v2 #arXiv241020014v2 #arXiv241103184v2 #arXiv241107509v3 #AstrophysicsOfGalaxies #BlackHoleSeeds #CosmologyAndNonGalacticAstrophysics #DiamondOpenAccess #eLISA #LSST #LymanAlphaForest #OJAp #OpenAccessPublishing #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #quasars #SoltanArgument #strongGravitationalLensing #TheOpenJournalOfAstrophysics #weakGravitationalLensing

For all #astro enthusiasts who look for some Sunday reading: have a look at my essay about what we know and what we don't know when analysing the light bending around cosmic structures
https://forums.fqxi.org/d/3504-the-cosmological-cheshire-cat-predictable-and-unpredictable-dark-matter-properties-by-jenny-wagner

#scicomm #science #astronomy #cosmology #astrophysics #PhilosophyOfCosmology #StrongGravitationalLensing

Space Warps from Euclid

A few months ago I posted about a joint initiative between Euclid and Galaxy Zoo that involved engaging members of the public in a project involving galaxy morphology. Well, a new “collab” (as you young people call such things) has just been announced on social media, and I encourage you to investigate further

The new venture is called `Space Warps – ESA Euclid’, and its aim is to find strong gravitational lenses in Euclid survey images. You can find out more about this project in this blog post by Knud Jahnke and you can find instructions and sign up for the project here.

The announcement of this initiative gives me an opportunity to pass on a little update on progress with the Euclid survey. The first `Quick’ Data Release (known to its friends as Q1) was made available to Euclid Consortium members just a few weeks ago. This will be made available to the general public next March, around the same time as the joint ESLAB and Euclid Consortium meeting in Leiden next year.

The Euclid survey is constructed as a set of contiguous `tiles’ covering the survey region, which will ultimately be about 15,000 square degrees (about one-third of the sky), with most of the region scanned by the satellite many times. The Q1 data will just be a taster of this. The main component of the Q1 data relates to a single visit (at the depth of the Euclid Wide Survey) over the Euclid Deep Fields (EDFs): 20 deg2 of the EDF North, 10 deg2 of EDF Fornax, and 23 deg2 of the EDF South. The deep fields will subsequently be visited multiple times during the mission.  The Q1 release will be of Level 2 data, i.e. data at the level of individual tiles.

The first full data release (DR1) is due to be published in June 2026.

#DR1 #EASEuclid #Euclid #EuclidConsortium #Q1 #strongGravitationalLensing

It’s Saturday morning again and time to post an update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. As last week there are six papers to announce, bringing the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 93 and the total altogether up to 208.

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

First one up, published on Monday 14th October 2024, is in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics and is called “Backreaction in Numerical Relativity: Averaging on Newtonian gauge-like hypersurfaces in Einstein Toolkit cosmological simulations“. This paper presents a numerical study of the effect of local inhomogeneities on the dynamical evolution of the Universe, i.e. the so-called “backreaction” problem; the authors are Alexander Oestreicher and Sofie Marie Koksbang of the University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark.

Here is a screen grab of the overlay, which includes the abstract:

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

The second paper to announce, published on 15th October 2024, is “Weak-Lensing Shear-Selected Galaxy Clusters from the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program: II. Cosmological Constraints from the Cluster Abundance” by I-Non Chiu (National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan) and 11 others based in Taiwan, Japan, India and the USA. This paper, which is also in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics  presents constraints on cosmological parameters obtained from a sample of galaxy clusters

You can see the overlay here:

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

The third paper is “Image formation near hyperbolic umbilic in strong gravitational lensing” by Ashish Kumar Meena (Ben Gurion University, Israel) and Jasjeet Singh Bagla (IISER Mohali, India). It presents a detailed theoretical discussion of a particular form of strong gravitational lensing and its observational consequences; it is in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies and was published on October 15th 2024.

The overlay is here:

The officially accepted version can be found on arXiv here.

The fourth paper, published on 16th October 2024 and in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies,  is “Weak Gravitational Lensing around Low Surface Brightness Galaxies in the DES Year 3 Data” by N. Chicoine (University of Chicago, USA) et al. (105 authors; DES Collaboration). It presents a  demonstration of the viability of using weak gravitational lensing to constrain the halo masses of low surface brightness galaxies.

The overlay is here

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

The fifth paper in this batch is “Imprints of interaction processes in the globular cluster system of NGC 3640” by Ana I Ennis (Waterloo, Canada) and Juan Pablo Caso & Lilia Patricia Bassino (Instituto de Astrofísica de La Plata, Argentina). This one was also published on 16th October 2024 and is in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, Here is the overlay

You can find the official accepted version on the arXiv here.

Finally for this week we have “On the nature of the C IV-bearing circumgalactic medium at 𝒛∼𝟏” by Suyash Kumar, Hsiao-Wen Chen, Zhijie Qu & Mandy C. Chen (U. Chicago), Fakhri S. Zahedy (U. North Texas), Sean D. Johnson (Carnegie Observatories), Sowgat Muzahid (IUCAA, India) and Sebastiano Cantalupo (U. Milan Bicocca)

The overlay is here

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

That’s it for now. More next week!

https://telescoper.blog/2024/10/19/six-new-publications-at-the-open-journal-of-astrophysics-2/

#240719081v2 #arXiv240300065v2 #arXiv240516826v2 #arXiv240611970v2 #arXiv240803049v1 #arXiv240815824v2 #AstrophysicsOfGalaxies #Backreaction #CarbonIVAbsorbers #CosmologyAndNonGalacticAstrophysics #DarkEnergySurvey #DES #EinsteinToolkit #galaxyClusters #globularClusters #NGC3640 #NumericalRelativity #strongGravitationalLensing #weakGravitationalLensing