Just coming back from holiday and didn’t check arxiv? Absolutely no worries. Catch up on Starxiv! Episode 20 being recorded very soon.

Episode 18 is being recorded later today and for the first time I’ll be a listener! Excited to sit back and catch up with the papers I missed whilst in China.

Finding it tricky to keep up with the arxiv over the summer between holidays and childcare? Let @runningastronomer.bsky.social and i help you out with @starxiv.bsky.social!

Episode 17 has dropped! Tune in to hear Payel & Michelle talk about about a dark matter subhalo detection, the problem(s) with super massive black holes, massive star clusters in the Sparkler, speedy white dwarfs and more! 🔭☄️ starxiv.com/2025/08/04/e...

In short, dynamical processes don’t quite do enough. Have we massively under-predicted the lensing effect?

A neat little explanation to tie some JWST loose ends.

Some beautiful new artwork to help you listen to the Starxiv!

Catching up with papers after a week’s worth of work travel. It’s going to take a while…😳

If you want to join our wonderful astrophysics research group here at Surrey, please get in touch with @derkal.bsky.social!

That's some pretty big stars :)

What a beautiful serendipitous discovery!

Perhaps time to move on from alpha abundance ratios?

Planetary archaeology!

It was fun recording our first podcast with @nbuckley0810.bsky.social! For the astute amongst you, I've moved office (hence the boxes...).

I'm feeling very excited about reading my @starxiv.bsky.social papers for tomorrow's podcast with @runningastronomer.bsky.social. It's starting to get pretty addictive...

Who doesn't want to read papers on the weekend? @runningastronomer.bsky.social and I just love reading papers.

My takeaway from this paper is that if we observe this planet for long enough (it might take a decade...) we will get enough signal-to-noise to more definitely exclude or claim life!

Greetings from Crete! Glad we managed to squeeze this one in before both Michelle and I disappeared for holidays. A really fun bunch of papers uniting the high and low redshift universe.

From Evan Davis' Made in Britain - we should be proud of our universities! Let's just hope they will get the support they need.

We finally worked out our mixer! And how to get a good signal to noise with podcasting equipment. Woohoo!

My first PhD student Dr Paula Gherghinescu. She’s done an amazing job trying to understand the information content encoded in phase-space data of M31-like galaxies.

Ok the lunar base would have to be comparable to SKA on Earth - that needs some pretty serious investment. But we would then be able to measure the 21cm line from the Dark Ages and essentially 'see' inflation!

Was a bit out of my comfort zone talking about the Dark Ages and radio arrays but isn't that the point of learning?

50 to 100 papers per days and 12 days of holiday - that's a lot of papers to catch up on in time for Starxiv @starxiv.bsky.social this Friday!

Deadline is tomorrow!

At least if you don't need baryonic processes to resolve the core/cusp discrepancy, simulations would be quicker to run?

I envy those who find the time to write an April Fools paper. It's on the cards for me one day...

We squeezed one in before Easter! It was a lot of fun going through all papers as usual but the April Fools papers were an added bonus this time!

My experience with BlueSky has been wonderful so far! Constructive and thought-provoking discourse on science. What more could you want?

Fun as ever chatting with @runningastronomer.bsky.social about the latest on ArXiv!

I'm a believer! I'm going to have to watch out...

As well as analytical work, a good assessment of systematic uncertainties really floats my boat!

A lot of new observations for Milky Way science!

Michelle talks about a potentially whole new class of pulsars! And I say something about making a potential supermassive black hole site - nuclear star clusters! With sims.

Exciting PhD opportunity to work with me to build a whole new way to model chemical evolution in galaxies using networks! Find out more at www.surrey.ac.uk/fees-and-fun...

I do love a good analytical model! Especially one that can neatly predict the diversity in the shapes of dark matter density profiles of dwarf galaxies. But why don't we see this in DMOs (dark-matter only sims)? Any experts out there? Would love to hear more about what you think.

JWST helps to detect smaller ultra-compact dwarf galaxies (though don't be fooled - this one's supermassive black hole is almost as big as ours).

A dwarf sitting in front of a disc galaxy - detected through IFU data! There's even some evidence that it's being disrupted.

We had to make do without a mixer but we had fun! Probably my favourite was stealthy satellites!

Staying on the topic of black holes, we talked about how binary black hole mergers might be used for standard siren cosmology, and how that may help with the Hubble tension. arxiv.org/abs/2502.10780

One more Einstein ring (arxiv.org/abs/2502.13788), with an additional lensed arc that allowed for a 5 sigma detection of an ultramassive black hole, placing the Cosmic Horseshoe 1.5 sigma above the black hole mass - stellar velocity dispersion relation.

Then there was the Einstein ring! In fact Euclid's first Einstein ring, and the first ever associated with an NGC object (arxiv.org/abs/2502.06505).

We spoke about an extremely young, metal-poor cluster in the tadpole galaxy (arxiv.org/abs/2502.07304). Chandra X-ray observations show an ultraluminous X-ray source (ULX). Modelling the X-ray spectrum of the source suggests standard accretion around an intermediate-mass black hole!

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Then there's the extremely metal poor C-19 stream that was originally detected in the Pristine Survey. The team have identified that it stretches over 100 degrees on the sky. While the chemistry is most compatible with a globular cluster, the stream is hotter than expected. arxiv.org/abs/2502.09710

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We squeezed in six papers this time! We're definitely getting more efficient at reading and talking about papers @runningastronomer.bsky.social.

Going two weekly hasn’t made it any easier to pick out just a few favourite papers!

We had a favourite topic this time! Gas accretion :)

We've gone biweekly! (every two weeks). The funny thing is that the more papers you read, the more you enjoy them. Trust @runningastronomer.bsky.social and me on this one.