Written in the Stars: How your (pens and) papers decide the fate of the arXiverse

Abstract: We all love the ecstasy that comes with submitting papers to journals or arXiv. Some have described it as yeeting their back-breaking products of labor into the void, wishing they could never deal with them ever again. The very act of yeeting papers onto arXiv contributes to the expansion of the arXiverse; however, we have yet to quantify our contribution to the cause. In this work, I investigate the expansion of the arXiverse using the arXiv astro-ph submission data from 1992 to date. I coin the term "the arXiverse constant", $a_0$, to quantify the rate of expansion of the arXiverse. I find that astro-ph as a whole has a positive $a_0$, but this does not always hold true for the six subcategories of astro-ph. I then investigate the temporal changes in $a_0$ for the astro-ph subcategories and astro-ph as a whole, from which I infer the fate of the arXiverse.