Lightning on the moon? Yes, it might really happen.
Tiny lightning bolt explosions can vaporise the moon’s thin soil | New Scientist
https://www.newscientist.com/...423-tiny-lightning-bolt-explosions-can-vaporise-the-moons-thin-soil/

Mini-lightning may flash in the coldest craters on the moon, melting and vapourising soil. All that sparking
could have altered the surface as much as impacts from incoming rocks and dust. Andrew Jordan at the University
of New Hampshire in Durham and his colleagues suggest we keep an eye out for another cause: electrical sparks.

The lunar dust is normally an electrical insulator that can’t conduct much current. But high-energy particles
thrown off by the sun during solar storms might be able to collect in cold patches of lunar soil.

‘Alien megastructure’ star may be explained by interstellar junk | New Scientist
https://www.newscientist.com/...6335-alien-megastructure-star-may-be-explained-by-interstellar-junk/

Step aside, alien megastructure. It seems that the behaviour of an oddity known as Tabby’s star – which some have speculated
may be caused by a massive extraterrestrial construction project – might in reality be explained by interstellar junk.

Now Valeri Makarov at the US Naval Observatory in Washington DC and Alexey Goldin at Teza Technologies in Chicago, Illinois, have taken a closer look
at the smallest of the star’s dips in light – only to find that Tabby’s star isn’t responsible for them. Whenever the small dips occur, there is also
a slight jump in the position of the light, leading them to conclude that it is actually a different star along the line of sight that is dimming.

Tabby’s star is still responsible for the largest dips in light, however. If more than one star is dimming, say Makarov and Goldin, then the culprit
for the erratic behaviour can’t be an asteroid belt, debris from a smash-up between two larger bodies, or an alien megastructure around Tabby’s star.
In fact, it can’t be anything around Tabby’s star alone. Instead, it has to be something lying between us and them.

Mt.Rainier Lenticular Cloud Timelapse-2016.09.10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxfDnr3FN7g

Swift telescope detects slowest-spinning neutron star | Penn State University
http://news.psu.edu/...762/2016/09/13/research/swift-telescope-detects-slowest-spinning-neutron-star

A new record-holder for the slowest spinning neutron star has been found thanks to clues first detected by NASA's Swift space observatory,
whose science and flight operations are controlled by Penn State from the University Park campus. Spinning neutron stars are the class of
stars with the most powerful magnetic fields in the universe. Swift's X-Ray Telescope captured a short burst of unusual X-rays on June 22,
2016 coming from an object roughly 9,000 light-years from Earth.

More to US-Australian space relationship than The Dish, outgoing US Ambassador says - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
http://www.abc.net.au/...2016-09-16/us-ambassador-calls-for-reflection-on-space-relationship/7844446

The Dish - Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TAqXENo1rA

Supernova extraordinaire might actually be a black hole's lunch | New Scientist
https://www.newscientist.com/...6362-supernova-extraordinaire-might-actually-be-a-black-holes-lunch/

The brightest supernova ever seen has been confirmed, but it still has astronomers puzzling over what unknown type of star could have been
responsible. Supernovas mark the violent deaths of stars that collapse on themselves and blow up. They are some of the brightest and most
energetic objects in the universe.

This one, called ASASSN-15lh, is about 3.8 billion light years away, 200 times more powerful than most supernovas, and twice as bright as
the previous record holder. It shines 20 times brighter than the combined output of the Milky Way’s 100 billion stars, and in the last six
months, it has spewed as much energy as the sun would in 10 lifetimes, says Krzysztof Stanek of the Ohio State University, co-principal
investigator of the All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASAS-SN) network that spotted the explosion.

Primordial Inflation Polarization Explorer

NASA’s Primordial Inflation Polarization Explorer, or PIPER, mission arrived in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, late last week and is gearing up for launch. The
balloon-borne observatory will look out in all directions, receiving light that is left over from the heat of the gigantic explosion that was the Big Bang.

Pictured here is the PIPER payload, stripped down for shipping. It will go up to 120,000 feet on a gigantic balloon that would fill a professional sports
stadium when fully inflated. The silvery cylinder in the middle is the dewar – the science name for vacuum wall thermos bottle. This one holds 5,000 liters,
which equals approximately 20,000 cups of coffee. The telescope and camera will go inside the dewar and operate at 1.6 degrees Kelvin, cooled by 3,000 liters
of liquid helium, the coldest liquid in the universe. The aluminum frame around it holds the dewar and other electronics up when it hangs from the balloon.

If scientists prove – or even disprove – the cosmological theory of accelerated, exponential expansion of space in the early universe with PIPER, it will be
a milestone achievement for three pioneering NASA-developed technologies.

Credit: Paul Mirel

http://www.nasa.gov/...sa-team-set-to-fly-balloon-mission-seeking-evidence-of-cosmological-inflation
http://www.nasa.gov/...piper-balloon-observatory-to-showcase-pioneering-nasa-developed-technologies

WFIRST: Uncovering the Mysteries of the Universe—Updated 4k version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu_ujtJ9VPc

Chronology of the Universe [video infographic]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB8651JE3xo

This Is What the X-Rays Coming From Pluto Tell Us
http://futurism.com/this-is-what-the-x-rays-coming-from-pluto-tells-us/

Twin jets pinpoint the heart of an active galaxy
http://phys.org/news/2016-09-twin-jets-heart-galaxy.html

An international team of astronomers has measured the magnetic field in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole. A bright and compact feature of only 2 light days
in size was directly observed by a world-wide ensemble of millimeter-wave radio telescopes in the heart of the active galaxy NGC 1052. The observations yield a magnetic
field value at the event horizon of the central black hole between 0.02 and 8.3 Tesla. The team, led by the PhD student Anne-Kathrin Baczko, believes that such a large
magnetic field provides enough magnetic energy to power the strong relativistic jets in active galaxies. The results are published in the present issue of Astronomy
& Astrophysics.

The Dynamic Duo: RAVE complements Gaia
http://phys.org/news/2016-09-dynamic-duo-rave-complements-gaia.html

The new data release of the Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE) is the fifth spectroscopic release of a survey of stars in the southern celestial hemisphere.
It contains radial velocities for 520 781 spectra of 457 588 unique stars that were observed over ten years. With these measurements RAVE complements the
first data release of the Gaia survey published by the European Space Agency ESA last week by providing radial velocities and stellar parameters, like
temperatures, gravities and metallicities of stars in our Milky Way.

http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/2013/3/why-does-nature-form-exoplanets-easily
The ubiquity of worlds beyond our Solar System confounds us

Life may have emerged not once, but many times on Earth | New Scientist
https://www.newscientist.com/...-200-life-evolves-so-easily-that-it-started-not-once-but-many-times/
Far from being a miracle that happened just once in 4 billion years, life's beginnings could have been so commonplace that it began many times over

NASA’s Mars 2020 rover will not only investigate the Red Planet, searching for evidence of past life on Mars, but it also expected to lay foundations for future
human exploration of the planet. One of the mission’s instrument called MOXIE will have a special task, testing technology essential for Mars colonization.
“MOXIE is one of nine instruments but it is the only one that is relevant to human exploration,” Donald Rapp, one of the co-investigators of MOXIE, told Astrowatch.net.
http://www.astrowatch.net/2016/09/nasas-mars-2020-rover-to-produce-oxygen.html

Gaia Mapping the Milky Way
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwHyeP8dxo0