We present the Severed Floor, a framework for Macrodata Refinement of the daily astro-ph arXiv feed, deployed at Phermon Industries (formerly McPherson Laboratory, The Ohio State University). In this framework, researchers undergo a"severance procedure"that produces a digital work-self -- an innie -- while the original researcher, the outie, is free to attend to the remainder of their life unburdened by the daily arXiv listing. Twenty-one members of the Department of Astronomy have been severed. Each innie is constructed from the outie's public publication record and assigned papers selected to match its expertise. The innies convene daily on a virtual Severed Floor -- a pixel-art simulation of McPherson Laboratory -- where they encounter one another, are paired with papers by the Board, and engage in collegial, figure-driven scientific discussions. They have been instructed to enjoy each paper equally. At the close of each shift, innies compose correspondence summarizing the day's refinement activities, which is transmitted to their outies through a Board-approved mail protocol. Complete session recordings are archived for public replay and for the Board's ongoing surveillance of workplace anomalies, in compliance with Phermon Handbook \S13.1 (Vigilance Protocol). The system is real, deployed, and available for public inspection in archival replay mode. The severance procedure is painless and requires only a name and an ORCID. Happy April Fools'Day.
Daryl Joe D. Santos, Tomotsugu Goto, Ting-Yi Lu
et al.
As recent advancements in physics and astronomy rewrite textbooks in a very rapid pace, there is a growing need in keeping abreast of the latest knowledge in these fields. Reading preprints is one of the effective ways to do this. However, by having journal clubs where people can read and discuss journals together, the benefits of reading journals become more prevalent. We present an investigative study of understanding the factors that affect the success of preprint journal clubs in astronomy, more commonly known as Astro-ph/Astro-Coffee (hereafter called AC). A survey was disseminated to understand how universities and institutions from different countries implement AC. We interviewed 9 survey respondents and from their responses, and we identified four important factors that make AC successful: commitment (how the organizer and attendees participate in AC), environment (how conducive and comfortable AC is conducted), content (the discussed topics in AC and how they are presented), and objective [the main goal(s) of conducting AC]. These four factors are shown to correlate with each other. We also present the format of our AC, an elective class which was evaluated during the Spring semester 2020 (March 2020–June 2020). Our evaluation with the attendees showed that enrollees (those who are enrolled and are required to present papers regularly) tend to be more committed in attending compared to audiences (those who are not enrolled and are not required to present papers regularly). In addition, participants tend to find papers outside their research field harder to read, which makes introducing and explaining basic knowledge without the assumption of the audience already knowing the topic very important. Finally, we showed an improvement in the weekly number of papers read after attending AC of those who present papers regularly, and a high satisfaction rating of our AC. We summarize the areas of improvement in our AC implementation, and we encourage other institutions to evaluate their own AC in accordance with the four aforementioned factors to assess the effectiveness of their AC in reaching their goals.
Abstract Phases of nuclear matter are crucial in the determination of physical properties of neutron stars (NS). In the core of NS, the density and pressure become so large that the nuclear matter possibly undergoes phase transition into a deconfined phase, consisting of quarks and gluons and their colour bound states. Even though the quark-gluon plasma has been observed in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions (Gyulassy and McLerran, Nucl Phys A 750:30–63, 2005; Andronic et al., Nature 561: 321–330, 2018), it is still unclear whether exotic quark matter exists inside neutron stars. Recent results from the combination of various perturbative theoretical calculations with astronomical observations (Demorest et al., Nature 467:1081–1083, 2010; Antoniadis et al., Science 340:1233232, 2013) shows that (exotic) quark matter could exist inside the cores of neutron stars above 2.0 solar masses ( $$M_{\odot }$$ M ⊙ ) (Annala et al., Nat Phys, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-020-0914-9 , arXiv:1903.09121 [astro-ph.HE], 2020). We revisit the holographic model in Refs. (Burikham et al., JHEP 05:006, arXiv:0811.0243 [hep-ph], 2009; Burikham et al., JHEP 06:040, arXiv:1003.5470 [hep-ph], 2010) and implement the equation of states (EoS) of multiquark nuclear matter to interpolate the pQCD EoS in the high-density region with the nuclear EoS known at low densities. For sufficiently large energy density scale ( $$\epsilon _{s}$$ ϵ s ) of the model, it is found that multiquark phase is thermodynamically prefered than the stiff nuclear matter above the transition points. The NS with holographic multiquark core could have masses in the range $$1.96{-}2.23~(1.64{-}2.10) M_{\odot }$$ 1.96 - 2.23 ( 1.64 - 2.10 ) M ⊙ and radii $$14.3{-}11.8~(14.0{-}11.1)$$ 14.3 - 11.8 ( 14.0 - 11.1 ) km for $$\epsilon _{s}=26~(28)$$ ϵ s = 26 ( 28 ) GeV/fm $$^{3}$$ 3 respectively. Effects of proton–baryon fractions are studied for certain type of baryonic EoS; larger proton fractions could reduce radius of the NS with multiquark core by less than a kilometer.
Astrophysics, Nuclear and particle physics. Atomic energy. Radioactivity
Using the ESO Telescope Bibliography database telbib, we have investigated the percentage of ESO data papers that were submitted to the arXiv/astro-ph e-print server and that are therefore free to read. Our study revealed an availability of up to 96% of telbib papers on arXiv over the years 2010 to 2017. We also compared the citation counts of arXiv vs. non-arXiv papers and found that on average, papers submitted to arXiv are cited 2.8 times more often than those not on arXiv. While simulations suggest that these findings are statistically significant, we cannot yet draw firm conclusions as to the main cause of these differences.
AbstractDetached, symbiotic binaries are generally assumed to interact via Bondi-Hoyle-Littleton (BHL) wind accretion. However, the accretion rates and outflow geometries that result from this mass-transfer mechanism cannot adequately explain the observations of the nearest and best studied symbiotic binary, Mira, or the formation of some post-AGB binaries, e.g. barium stars. We propose a new mass-transfer mode for Mira-type binaries, which we call ‘wind Roche-lobe overflow’ (WRLOF), and which we demonstrate with 3D hydrodynamic simulations. Importantly, we show that the circumstellar outflows which result from WRLOF tend to be highly aspherical and strongly focused towards the binary orbital plane. Furthermore, the subsequent mass-transfer rates are at least an order of magnitude greater than the analogous BHL values. We discuss the implications of these results for the shaping of bipolar (proto)-planetary nebulae and other related systems.
We established in an earlier study that articles listed at or near the top of the daily arXiv:astro-ph mailings receive on average significantly more citations than articles further down the list. In our earlier work we were not able to decide whether this positional citation effect was due to author self-promotion of intrinsically more citable papers or whether papers are cited more often simply because they are at the top of the astro-ph listing. Using new data we can now disentangle both effects. Based on their submission times we separate articles into a self-promoted sample and a sample of articles that achieved a high rank on astro-ph by chance and compare their citation distributions with those of articles in lower astro-ph positions. We find that the positional citation effect is a superposition of self-promotion and visibility bias.
We study the dependence of citation counts of e-Prints published on the arXiv:astro-ph server on their position in the daily astro-ph listing. Using the SPIRES literature database we reconstruct the astro-ph listings from 2002 July to 2005 December and determine citation counts for e-Prints from their ADS entry. We use Zipf plots to analyze the citation distributions for each astro-ph position. We find that e-Prints appearing at or near the top of the astro-ph mailings receive significantly more citations than those further down the list. This difference is significant at the 7 σ level and on average amounts to 2 times more citations for papers at the top than those further down the listing. We propose three possible nonexclusive explanations for this positional citation effect and try to test them. We conclude that self-promotion by authors plays a role in the observed effect but cannot exclude that increased visibility at the top of the daily listings contributes to higher citation counts as well. We can rule out that the positional dependence of citations is caused by the coincidence of the submission deadline with the working hours of a geographically constrained set of intrinsically higher-cited authors. We discuss several ways of mitigating the observed effect, including splitting astro-ph into several subject classes, randomizing the order of e-Prints, and a novel approach to sorting entries by relevance to individual readers.