astronomy

2026 April Fools’ Day papers

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This year’s April Fools’ Day arXiv paper haul was possibly the biggest one I have seen so far (as always, they are marked with a special symbol around April 1st on my daily arXiv picks). Thanks to John Beacom for pointing 2603.29912, which I missed on my first pass.

379710-200 Predictions of the LSST Solar System (non-)Yield
Joseph Murtagh, Ian Chow
2604.00206 astro-ph

379710-200 Pegasi Ascendant: Ranking Constellation Genitives on their Aesthetic Merit
Pranav Nagarajan
2604.00144 astro-ph

379710-200 Your Outie Is a Wonderful Astronomer: Macrodata Refinement of the Astro-ph ArXiv Feed at Phermon Industries
Yuan-Sen Ting
2603.29771 astro-ph

379710-200 On The Detection of Digiorno-like Objects in the Flavor Zone
Logan A. Pearce, Sue D’Oh Nym
2603.28977 astro-ph

379710-200 New Paradigms in Pasta: Introducing 𝙢𝙡 πš™πšŠπšœπšπšŠπš–πšŠπš›πš”πšŽπš›πšœ for Enhanced Inclusivity and Productivity
Julian Falcone, Nabanita Das
2603.28957 astro-ph

379710-200 What does the Universe sound like?
Francesco Iacovelli
2603.29996 gr-qc

379710-200 Mexican Burrowing Toads as gravitational wave detectors
Frederic V. Hessman, Christian Jooss
2603.29334 gr-qc

379710-200 Galactic Constellations in DESI DR1 and the Scales of Cosmological Homogeneity
Claire Lamman
2603.29912 astro-ph

379710-200 AI Cosplaying as Astrophysicists: A Controlled Synthetic-Agent Study of AI-Assisted Astrophysical Research Workflows
Chun Huang
2603.29039 astro-ph

379710-200 An innovative alternative to traditional funding streams for extragalactic astronomy
Stephen M. Wilkins, Jack Turner, Connor Sant Fournier, Behnood Bandi, Aswin Vijayan
2603.29340 astro-ph

379710-200 Declarative bespoke modelling: A new approach
DBM Collaboration: David Komanek, Vaclav PavlΓ­k, Santiago Jimenez, Rhys Taylor
2603.28847 astro-ph

379710-200 SchrΓΆdinger’s Seed: Purr-fect Initialization for an Impurr-fect Universe
Mi chen, Renhao Ye
2603.29115 astro-ph

379710-200 A Lower Bound on the Number of Fundamental Constants
William Luke Matthewson
2603.29300 astro-ph

379710-200 CROCS Data Release I: Constraints on the Hubble Constant
Luke Weisenbach et al.
2603.29879 astro-ph

379710-200 First Detection of Exoplanetary Cannabinoids: Evidence for THC and CBD in the Atmosphere of K2-18b
Amie J. Chism et al.
2603.29700 astro-ph

379710-200 The Universe Favors Primes: A Study in the Primality of Cosmic Structures
Nan Li, Shiyin Shen
2603.29321 astro-ph

379710-200 Do Papers with Titles Ending in a Question Mark Usually Have the Answer β€œNo”?
Daniel Stern, Brian Grefenstette
2603.29936 astro-ph

379710-200 No hair but plenty of feathers: are birds black holes?
Andrew Laeuger, Taylor Knapp
2603.29064 gr-qc

379710-200 New Constraints on the M Dwarf Cosmic Shoreline from a Galaxy Far, Far Away
Michael Radica
2603.29743 astro-ph

379710-200 Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
Wolf Cukier, Dominic Samra, Vighnesh Nagpal, Diana Powell, Maria Steinrueck, Christopher Wirth
2603.29883 astro-ph

379710-200 Milky Way evolution on a human timescale
Eugene, Neige
2603.29503 astro-ph

379710-200 The Hollyfeld Gambit in Astrophysics
Benne Holwerda
2603.29964 astro-ph

379710-200 StarHash: unique, memorable, and deterministic names for astronomical objects
T. L. Killestein
2603.29584 astro-ph

379710-200 A Therapy Session with Sgr A*
Mayura Balakrishnan, Robert Frazier, Joseph Michail
2603.29963 astro-ph

379710-200 Enabling fundamental understanding of Nature with novel binning methods for 2D histograms
Igor Vaiman
2603.30006 astro-ph

379710-200 Antimatter Propulsion for Interstellar Travel via Positron Production from Potassium-40 Rich Biological Matter
C. Hall, L. N. H. P. Hall
2603.29635 astro-ph

379710-200 Cow-culation: Reentry Impact Risk to Livestock in the Satellite Megaconstellation Era
Samantha M. Lawler, Michele T. Bannister, Laura E. Revell
2603.29324 astro-ph

379710-200 Lots of Shade on Satellite Constellations
Michael B. Lund
2603.29212 physics

379710-200 Where to Search For Life: Evidence from narrative sources with established predictive efficacy
Elizabeth R Stanway
2603.28883 astro-ph

379710-200 Plan 9: Detecting Atmospheric Deterrence Against Interstellar Monsters
David R. Rice, Michael J. Radke
2603.28895 astro-ph

379710-200 Sugar Rush: Improving Observing Productivity via Night Dessert
J.J. Charfman Jr, S. Hyman, N.T.S
2603.28915 astro-ph

Global monitoring for high-energy neutrino astronomy

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Genuine high-energy neutrino astronomy needs many and varied astrophysical sources. But finding sources is hard, especially having only one km-scale neutrino telescope in operation. This is changing fast, though, thanks to the ongoing construction of KM3NeT and Baikal-GVD, but transformative progress will require us to think globally.

In a new paper, led by Lisa Schumacher, we show that, in the next 10-20 years, IceCube + Baikal-GVD, KM3NeT, IceCube-Gen2, P-ONE, TRIDENT, NEON, & HUNT, taken together in PLEnuM, could allow us to make global high-energy neutrino monitoring a reality. Together, they will increase the global rate of neutrino detection by up to 30 times and continuously monitor the entire sky.

To showcase this, we focus on one of the most prominent science cases in high-energy neutrino astronomy: finding steady-state sources. A combined analysis of global data will expedite source discovery—in some cases, by decades—and enable the detection of fainter sources anywhere in the sky, discovering up to tens of new neutrino sources.

This is seen, for example, in our forecasts for the evolution of the discovery potential of neutrino sources that have a soft spectrum (like NGC 1068), placed in different locations in the sky:

The PLEnuM tools used to obtain the results in our paper (plus more) are open-source and available on GitHub, here.

Read more at:

Beyond first light: global monitoring for high-energy neutrino astronomy
Lisa Johanna Schumacher, Mauricio Bustamante, Matteo Agostini, Foteini Oikonomou, Elisa Resconi
2503.07549Β astro-ph