The Physical Review is expanding its coverage of astronomy and astrophysics.

Several free-to-publish and Open Access journals of our portfolio have come together to form the Astronomy and Astrophysics Topical Group. It covers a broad range of topics, from nuclear astrophysics to exoplanets and planetary atmospheres, through our broad-scope premier journals Physical Review Letters and Physical Review X, and our topical journals Physical Review C, Physical Review D, Physical Review E, Physical Review Fluids, Physical Review Research, PRX Life, as well as Reviews of Modern Physics.

American Physical Society earns top score in SCOAP3 open science assessment

APS and Astrobites Announce Partnership

International Symposium of Nuclei in the Cosmos XVIII (NIC XVIII)

Jun 15-20

Girona, Spain

Meet the Editor: Gabriel Martínez-Pinedo

The Physical Review is expanding its coverage of astrophysics and astronomy and wants to ensure that papers from these fields have a welcome home in our journals. This collection highlights several significant papers to illustrate the type of research we seek to publish.

Carlos Hervías-Caimapo, Ari J. Cukierman, Patricia Diego-Palazuelos, Kevin M. Huffenberger, and Susan E. Clark

Phys. Rev. D 111, 083532 (2025) - Published 15 April, 2025

The detection of rotation of linearly polarized cosmic microwave background photons, which is called cosmic birefringence, may suggest new parity-violating physics. However, scattering by dust can also mimic this same effect. In this paper, the authors extend a pre-existing dust filament model to compute this effect to make a forecast for future CMB experiments and assess the effect of this dust on present isotropic measurements of cosmic birefringence.

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Orion Ning and Benjamin R. Safdi

Phys. Rev. Lett. 134, 171003 (2025) - Published 1 May, 2025

Two independent teams have searched for axions using x-ray observations of entire galaxies, setting some of the strictest constraints to date on the properties of these dark matter candidates.

Xiongdong Yu, Zhigang Yuan, Dedong Wang, Oliver Allanson, and Samuel Hunter

Phys. Rev. E 111, L033201 (2025) - Published 18 March, 2025

The dynamics of electrons in space plasmas, such as the earth’s radiation belts, are affected by the presence of wave turbulence, even when a resonance condition is not satisfied. The authors propose an expression to describe this resonance broadening effect, and find that it compares well with test particle simulation results. The study is applied to whistler-mode chorus waves in the radiation belt’s electrons, but can be easily extended to a wide range of systems.

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Physics Magazine spoke with dark matter hunter Elena Pinetti at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics. Pinetti searches for all dark matter candidates—she has no favorite. At the moment, however, her focus is on axions, which she says might be spotted in JWST data that others researchers consider to be junk.

Email us at astro@aps.org

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