Seven new embedded clusters detected in the Galactic halo
http://phys.org/news/2016-07-embedded-clusters-galactic-halo.html
A team of Brazilian astronomers, led by Denilso Camargo of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre,
has discovered seven new embedded clusters located unusually far away from the Milky Way's disc. The findings, presented
in a paper published July 3 on arXiv.org, could provide new insights on star cluster formation.
Embedded clusters are stellar clusters encased in an interstellar dust or gas, consisting of extremely young stars. They
are crucial for astronomers to better understand star formation and early stellar evolution. Studying these clusters could
reveal the origin of stellar masses as well as the origin and evolution of protoplanetary disks, where planet formation
processes take place.

A Pulsar and a Disk
http://aasnova.org/2016/07/25/a-pulsar-and-a-disk/
Recent, unusual X-ray observations from our galactic neighbor, the Small Magellanic Cloud,
have led to an interesting model for SXP 214, a pulsar in a binary star system.

The energy distribution of the X-ray emission from SXP 214 over time. Dark shades or blue colors indicate high counts, and light
shades or yellow colors indicate low counts. Lower-energy X-ray emission appeared only later, after about 20 ks. [Hong et al. 2016]

Exciting New Images | Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera
http://www.lroc.asu.edu/posts/932

Just-so black holes | Harvard Gazette
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/07/just-so-black-holes/
Astronomers Aaron Smith and Volker Bromm of the University of Texas at Austin, working with Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,
have discovered evidence for an unusual kind of black hole born extremely early in the universe. In new research they show that a recently discovered
source of intense radiation is likely powered by a “direct-collapse black hole,” a phenomenon predicted by theorists more than a decade ago.

The work was published this month in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Telescopes could be smaller, lighter and less power hungry
SPIDER shrinks telescopes with far-out design | Science News
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/spider-shrinks-telescopes-far-out-design

NASA’s SDO Watches Bursts of Solar Material
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUJs1nxMC4A

OSIRIS-REx Tech – Surveying an Asteroid with Light
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYmgc9XL_Vs

A state-of-the-art telescope to study light with wavelengths of about one millimetre,
shining from some of the coldest objects in the Universe, ALMA is a cooperation of
the European Southern Observatory (ESO), together with its international partners.
The site of ALMA is the 5000-m altitude Chajnantor plateau in northern Chile, one of
the driest places on Earth.

ALMA Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlYFkP-zgBU

On Thursday, July 21 at 6:00pm PDT (9:00pm EDT), Ed Beshore joined NSN members
to share the details about NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bennu.

NSN Webinar: The OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Return Mission
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swVI1EUnLjs

DCT primary mirror, 5 minutes out of the coating chamber.
Thanks to Jeffrey Hall, Director of Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, AZ.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/26/science/last-universal-ancestor.html
A surprisingly specific genetic portrait of the ancestor of all living things has been generated by scientists
who say that the likeness sheds considerable light on the mystery of how life first emerged on Earth.

This venerable ancestor was a single-cell, bacterium-like organism. But it has a grand name, or at least an acronym.
It is known as Luca, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, and is estimated to have lived some four billion years ago,
when Earth was a mere 560 million years old.

The new finding sharpens the debate between those who believe life began in some extreme environment, such as in deep
sea vents or the flanks of volcanoes, and others who favor more normal settings, such as the “warm little pond”
proposed by Darwin.

Making Jupiter into a Star
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=36026
The SETI concepts now called ‘Dysonian’ are to my mind some of the most exhilarating ideas in the field.
Dysonian SETI gets its name from the ‘Dyson spheres’ and ‘Dyson swarms’ analyzed by Freeman Dyson in a 1960 paper.
This is a technology that an advanced civilization might use to harvest the energy of its star. You can see how
this plays off Nikolai Kardashev’s classification of civilizations; Kardashev suggested that energy use is a way
to describe civilizations at the broadest level. A Type II society is one that can use all the energy of its star.

Delensing of cosmic microwave background could reveal ancient gravitational waves - physicsworld.com
http://physicsworld.com/...g-of-cosmic-microwave-background-could-reveal-ancient-gravitational-waves
Physicists in the UK and the US have shown how to use one kind of diffuse cosmic radiation – the cosmic infrared background (CIB) –
to create a better map of potentially very important variations in another – the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The researchers
say that their work, which involves reversing the effects of gravitational lensing, will aid in the discovery of inflationary
phenomena known as primordial gravitational waves, should they exist.

The Stars Of Andromeda, Inside And Out, As Revealed By Hubble
http://www.forbes.com/...5/the-stars-of-andromeda-inside-and-out-as-revealed-by-hubble/#56e6450f63b3

https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/jpl/pia20491/bent-rings
Saturn's A and F rings appear bizarrely warped where they intersect the planet's limb, whose atmosphere acts here like a very big lens.

In its upper regions, Saturn’s atmosphere absorbs some of the light reflected by the rings as it passes through. But absorption is not
the only thing that happens to that light. As it passes from space to the atmosphere and back out into space towards Cassini’s cameras,
its path is refracted, or bent. The result is that the ring's image appears warped.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 18 degrees above the ring plane. The image was taken in visible light
with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 9, 2016. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.8 million km
from the rings and at a Sun-rings-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 112 degrees. Image scale is 7 miles (11 kilometers) per pixel.