News
2021 A&A awards
The two winners of the first edition of the A&A awards for individuals in the initial stages of their careers were announced at the annual meeting of the European Astronomical Society.
PhD prize
Miriam Keppler
After undergraduate studies at Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, Miriam Keppler moved to MPIA in Heidelberg, where she completed both her master’s degree, which included an ERASMUS year in Grenoble, and her PhD, and where she is now a postdoc. She is probably best known for her discovery of a (proto)planet in a gap of a protoplanetary disk, which is the first such detection and something that planetary astronomers had been seeking for a long time. Protoplanetary disks and planets have both been imaged for over a decade, and gravitational interaction with an embedded planet has always been one leading explanation for the gaps that are observed in some of those disks, but Miriam Keppler's 2018 A&A paper first closed this loop by finding an uncontroverted observational example. Miriam Keppler has since built on this work by characterizing both disks, through ALMA and near-IR high contrast imaging, and planets, through near-IR spectrophotometry. The broad scope of her work is impressive for someone who completed her PhD less than a year ago and bodes very well for her future career.
Early career prize
Joanna Drazkowska
After undergraduate studies and a master’s degree at the Copernicus University in Torun, Joanna Drazkowska moved to the Institute for Theoretical Astronomy in Heidelberg for her PhD, and she has since been a postdoc, first at the Institute for Computational Science in Zurich and now at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich. Her work is on the theoretical side of planet formation in protoplanetary disks; she develops models of the growth of the solid phase from micron-size dust grains to Earth-size (and larger) planets. The 2016 A&A article for which she is receiving the A&A early career award is a milestone in that field as it was the first to overcome the fragmentation barrier, or meter-size barrier, which had blocked all previous planet formation models. Joanna Drazkowska showed that the "traffic-jam effect" (a local drop in the radial speed of the particles) that results from the radial drift of the solids can locally enhance the solid/gas density ratio to the point where planetesimals can form via a particle-gas hydrodynamical effect known as streaming instability, hence removing the previous decimeter limit to growth. This trailblazing study triggered many follow-up studies on mechanisms for dust pileup, both by Joanna Drazkowska and her collaborators and by others, and has been extremely influential.
2021 Impact Factor – over 6 again and the highest ever
We are pleased to report that Astronomy & Astrophysics’ impact factor has increased to 6.240 – its highest ever impact factor. It is ranked 12 in the Astronomy & Astrophysics category (Q1) and is clearly held in high regard by its community (its CiteScore also increased significantly this year). We look forward to further success following A&A’s transition to the Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) open access model in 2022.
2023 A&A awards
The 2023 A&A prize for PhD work published in A&A will be awarded on July 14th at the EAS Annual Meeting in Krakow. The award recognizes an article of exceptional quality published in A&A by an individual who defended a PhD in the last two years (https://www.aanda.org/news/2659-astronomy-astrophysics-awards-2023).
2024 A&A Awards reward the work of early-career researchers
On February 23rd, 2024, the A&A Board finalised their selection for this year's A&A Awards, recognising exceptional work of early-career researchers in the field.
2025 A&A Awards recognise outstanding early-career researchers
On March 5th 2025, the A&A Board finalised their selection for this year’s A&A Awards, recognising the exceptional work of early-career researchers in the field.
A&A Awards 2024 update: Cash prize now available
The Board of Directors of A&A is pleased to announce that each recipient of the A&A Awards 2024 will be recognized with a cash prize of 2000 Euros. The A&A Awards underscore the commitment of the Journal to promote the scientific work of young researchers for their outstanding contributions to the field published in A&A.
A&A Board announces accession of Ireland and grants observer status to Uruguay
Paris, France, September 06, 2023. The annual meeting of the A&A Board of Directors was held in Heraklion, Greece on May 31st and June 1st 2023. During this meeting, the A&A Board, the governing body of the journal, made several key decisions. These included defining long-term scientific policies, establishing publishing guidelines, and appointing new Scientific Editors. Additionally, the Board recommended approval of the journal budget to the ESO Council and took other actions to maintain and develop A&A's status as one of the premier peer-reviewed journals in the field.
A&A confirms open access in 2022 through Subscribe-to-Open
Paris, France, 4 April 2022: Following the announcement made in October 2021 that Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A) would move to the Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) open access model in 2022, the A&A board of directors and EDP Sciences are pleased to announce that A&A has now received the required level of support and will be published open access in 2022 under the terms of this transformative model.
A&A policy on name changes
A&A embraces open, inclusive, and fair practices that reflect the culture and values of the worldwide community of astronomers. As such, the A&A Board of the Directors, at their June 2021 meeting, has supported a new policy for name changes. The Board recognizes that authors may change their names for many reasons, including gender identity change, marriage or divorce, religious conversion, or purely personal reasons, and supports the best practices put forth by COPE. A&A can and will change names by request from an author in all web versions of the author’s papers and their associated metadata. A&A will not be able to change names on paper-printed articles already disseminated in libraries across the world but it can and will change names on the PDF version of papers produced under the current production contract. Authors that request name changes should contact SAO/NASA ADS to make sure the name change propagates to their databases. A&A recommends that authors register with ORCID, which will identify their work independently of their name. For more details, please see the full EDP author name change policy.
A&A ranked among top astronomy & astrophysics journals in Clarivate Analytics JCR® (June 2017)
The latest Journal Citation Reports® recently announced by Clarivate Analytics* have confirmed that Astronomy & Astrophysics’ Impact Factor has remained above 5. Astronomy & Astrophysics sits with the Astrophysical Journal as the two highest ranked titles publishing original research in the Astronomy and Astrophysics category.
In addition to the highest quality research papers, A&A publishes important special issues from the missions of Planck, Herschel, ROSETTA and Gaia.
*2016 Journal Citation Reports® (JCR) Clarivate Analytics, 2017
A&A special issue (April 2018): H.E.S.S. Collaboration observations of the Milky Way
Astronomy & Astrophysics, published by EDP Sciences, has published a special issue presenting observations and analyses of the plane of the Milky Way, as surveyed by the multi-national High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S) Collaboration.
H.E.S.S is a system of Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes that detect cosmic gamma ray sources and air showers of charged particles. The largest telescope in the H.E.S.S array - based in Namibia – is constructed with a mirror that is 28cm in diameter.
To read the special issue, please click here.
A&A special issue (August 2018): Gaia Data Release 2
Astronomy & Astrophysics, published by EDP Sciences, has published a special issue on the second data release (DR2) of the Gaia space mission which has been recording astrometric and photometric measurements since July 2014.
Gaia is an astrometric space observatory developed by the European Space Agency. It is devoted to measuring the position, distance and movement of stars. Gaia DR2 is based on the analysis on the first 22 months of the mission and the data release gives an insight into its full potential. It represents “a game-changing leap for stellar and Galactic astronomy” ( Forveille, T., Kotak, R., Shore, S. and Tolstoy, E., A&A 616, E1 (2018) ).
To read the special issue, please click here
A&A special issue (February 2019): LOFAR Surveys
Astronomy & Astrophysics, published by EDP Sciences, has published a special issue on the LOFAR telescope which is being used to survey the full northern celestial hemisphere in the 120 MHz band with unprecedented resolution and sensitivity.
This special issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics presents the first data release of the LOFAR Two-metre Sky Survey, along with selected early results.
The release also includes an extracted catalog of 326 000 sources, complete to 0.35 mJy for point sources. 70% of these sources are associated with an optical counterpart, and photometric redshifts are also provided. The early results of the survey span a wide range of mostly extragalactic topics, from the physics of active galactic nuclei to the intergalactic magnetic field, by way of interstellar medium and clusters of galaxies.
To read the special issue, please Click here
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A&A special issue (October 2020) : The Solar Orbiter mission
Astronomy & Astrophysics, published by EDP Sciences, presents a series of articles on the Solar Orbiter space mission and its ten instruments.
Solar Orbiter, an ESA-NASA collaboration, was launched on February 10, 2020. It carries the most comprehensive payload flown in the inner heliosphere to date, with six remote-sensing instruments that image the Sun and its surroundings as well as four in situ instruments for monitoring the immediate environment of the spacecraft. A series of Venus and Earth gravity assists will adjust the probe’s perihelion to a minimum of 0.28 AU and raise the inclination of the orbital plane to over 33 degrees. This will allow the first-ever look at the solar poles. Thus, Solar Orbiter is the conceptual combination of two missions: an out-of-ecliptic in situ probe (like Ulysses) and one that brings state-of-the-art telescopes (which are an improvement over those of, e.g., SOHO and SDO) closer to the Sun than ever before as well as over the solar poles. Solar Orbiter will address the most pressing open questions of solar physics, and its results will remain unique for at least the next decade.
All calibrated science data will be made available three months after their reception on the ground, in line with the open-data philosophy of the mission. This publication is coordinated with the release of the first data from the four in situ instruments through the public ESA Solar Orbiter archive. This special feature was coordinated by Yannis Zouganelis and the Solar Orbiter teams.
To read the Solar Orbiter mission special issue, please click here.
A&A special issue (September 2020) : Planck 2018 results
Astronomy & Astrophysics, published by EDP Sciences, has published a special feature on the results from the ESA Planck mission, based on data released by ESA and the Planck Collaboration in July 2018.
This 2018 data release has significantly lower systematic residuals for both Planck instruments, LFI and HFI, and a more accurate photometric calibration for HFI. These calibration improvements are most significant over the largest angular scales and for the polarized emission. The resulting frequency maps were used to separate the diffuse sky emission into maps of the cosmic microwave background, the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect, the cosmic infrared background, and the Galactic thermal dust, carbon monoxide, anomalous dust, free-free, and synchrotron emission.
The 12 articles in the special issue describe the released data products and present scientific results extracted by the Planck Collaboration from this data. The six-parameter ΛCDM model continues to provide an excellent fit to the cosmic microwave background data at high and low redshift. Planck measures five of those six parameters to better than 1%, and together with external datasets, sets tight limits to many possible extensions of the model. Beyond those immediate results, the Planck 2018 dataset constitutes an essential treasure trove and will have lasting importance for both cosmology and foreground astrophysics. This special feature was coordinated by Jan Tauber and the Planck Science Team.
To read the Planck 2018 results special issue, please click here.
A&A Survey to Understand Publishing Needs of the Astronomical Community
As part of A&A’s ongoing commitment to our authors and readers, Astronomy & Astrophysics has launched a short survey to better understand the publishing needs and priorities of our community.
In a rapidly evolving landscape of scientific publishing, it is more important than ever for A&A, a journal for astronomers by astronomers, to listen carefully to the community it serves. This survey explores key issues including open access, peer review, the role of AI, and journal selection criteria.
Announcement from the A&A Board of Directors: Call for Candidates for Managing Editor of A&A (June 2018)
The Board of Directors of Astronomy & Astrophysics invites applications for the position of Managing Editor, which will become vacant in July, 2018.
Appendices published as camera-ready material
Dear Colleagues,
The success of the A&A journal brings with it a rapid growth in the number of articles and pages which we have to process in production.
As a consequence of this success and to keep down production costs, we have decided to typeset the Appendices as camera-ready material. This means that our publisher (EDP Sciences) will no longer modify the Latex layout of the appendices.
However, some cases, such as an Appendix starting with a title followed by
a blank page, still need to be handled, and we then have to ask you a small
extra effort. As many of these issues are recurring ones that we have identified,
or are in the process of identifying, we have produced a short document to guide you through these changes.
Sincerely,
Thierry Forveille (Editor in Chief), David Elbaz (Managing Editor)
Astronomy & Astrophysics Awards 2021
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A), the Board of Directors of A&A is establishing two awards for outstanding research published in A&A by individuals in the initial stages of their careers. With these awards, the Board wishes to express its appreciation, and contribute to the enthusiasm, of the new generation of researchers who will be shaping astronomy for the decades to come.
Astronomy & Astrophysics Awards 2022
The Board of Directors of A&A attributes two yearly awards for outstanding research published in A&A by individuals in the initial stages of their careers. With these two awards, the Board wishes to express its appreciation, and contribute to the enthusiasm, of the new generation of researchers who will be shaping astronomy for the decades to come.